2015 Nobel Prize in Literature


The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time". She is described as the first journalist and the first Belarusian national to receive the Nobel prize which she received on December 10, 2015.

Laureate

Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In her books, she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. With her "documentary novels", Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. Her major works includes the Chernobylskaya molitva and U voyny ne zhenskoe litso. Her books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus as in Vremya sekond khend.

Nominations

According to Peter Englund, there were a total of 198 writers nominated with 36 new candidates for the award. Among the favorites for this year included were Svetlana Alexievich, Haruki Murakami, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Jon Fosse, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Ko Un.
In 2016, Alexievich hoped that Murakami wins the Nobel Prize, but was eventually awarded to Bob Dylan. She expressed: "I've read all of Murakami's works. I love this writer, although they say that it is a simplified literature. I like the oriental arrangement of events and their understanding, I am interested in."

"Documentary Literature"

Alexievich herself rejects the notion that she is a journalist, and, in fact, Alexievich's chosen genre is sometimes called "documentary literature": an artistic rendering of real events, with a degree of poetic license. In her own words:

Nobel lecture and award ceremony

Alexievich delivered a Nobel lecture on December 7, 2015 entitled On the Battle Lost, which was originally in Russian. In her lecture, she depicted life during and after the Soviet Union through the various experience of individuals based on interviews and creating them into collages of memories.
Sara Danius, in the presentation of the award, said: