Among 198 writers nominated for the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature including 36 first ever nominees, the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich has been announced winner for "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time", the Swedish Academy announced. Born in Ukraine, Alexievich has dug for herself a career in journalism working for local press as well as corresponding literary magazines. Depending on interviews she made with witnesses to the most traumatic scenes like the World War II, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the disaster of Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986 and the deterioration of the Soviet Union, the 67 year old author built her narratives adopting a new literary technique blending journalism with literature. In an interview, Alexievich said this blending is attributed to the Russian tradition of oral storytelling. "I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me," she said. "Each person offers a text of his or her own." "By means of her extraordinary method — a carefully composed collage of human voices — Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era," the Nobel Academy said. Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, was quoted as saying Alexievich had created "a history of emotions — a history of the soul, if you wish", adding she managed to fabricate a "new literary genre" so prominent on the levels of "material and form". Alexievich said the main topic of all her works was the ever-lasting dialogue between "executioners and victims" in a history full of "bloodshed". In 1985, she published her first novel, War's Unwomanly Face where a number of womenthrough monologuesrevealed their sufferings under the World War II circumstances. Suffering amid wars was echoed once again in her The Last Witnesses: the Book of Unchildlike Stories where she recalled her own memories at the time of war. Her Enchanted With Death came to light in 1993 to depict Russians committing suicide following the fall of the Soviet Union for their inability to cope with the new world order imposed in the absence of communist ideology. Depending on more than 500 interviews she made survivors from the Chernobyl reactor accident, she created "Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" that was published in the U.S. in 2005.
