“How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.”

Belarusian author, investigative journalist, and oral historian

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian author, investigative journalist, and oral historian who writes in Russian. She received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her polyphonic writing, which the prize committee described as a monument to suffering and courage in our time. She was the first writer from Belarus to receive the award. Her work is built from many voices, and she is known for shaping testimony into literary form. Through that method, her writing explores human experience with close attention to memory, pain, and endurance, while remaining rooted in reported speech and lived experience.