The Royal Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2015 on Thursday to Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," noted the Nobel Prize's website.
Alexievich, 67, is the 14th woman out of 107 authors to win the Nobel Literature Prize, reported The New York Times. Other prize winners include Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison.
Alexievich is best known for her oral history, "Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster," translated into English by writer Keith Gessen, according to BBC News.
On her website the author writes that she is a journalist and a historian She blends journalism and literature in her writings. Her technique was inspired by the Russian oral storytelling tradition, The New York Times noted.
She records conversations with 500 to 700 people for each book she writes, CNN reported.
"Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire," she said. "Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life."
The author stated, "I'm writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details," CNN noted.
"And my genre, I refer to it as 'the novel of voices' and you might say that my work as just simply lying on the ground and I go and I gather it and pick it up and I put it together. If Flaubert said 'I am a man of the pen - or the plume,' I could say of myself that I am a person of the ear."
As the winner of the Nobel Literature Prize, Alexievich is awarded a little more than $1 million, according to MSN News.
