Svetlana Alexievich

A person who I would like to meet is the journalist and prize-winning writer, Svetlana Alexievich. This Belarusian woman (since 1991 before that date she was Soviet) was born in 1948, in a Ukrainian-Bielarus family who influenced her to be a school teacher but she started at a young age to work as a reporter for a local paper in Narovl. 

Later she became in a professional journalist when she received her degree in Minsk University. One of the things why I admire her is the way she writes. At the moment, she has written essays, novels, stories and articles for different media, all of them with the particularity of being written with a big approximation to the real life. She helps the reader to almost be the principal character when they read what she wrote. It is fascinating how we can almost see with our own eyes the story she brings to us. Her work is so meticulous in the moment to take the reality to paper and that is not a simple thing to do, it requires passion and a big knowledge about what we want to talk.

This dedication for her work, takes her to win in 2015 the Nobel Prize in Literature. Svetlana published her first book in 1985,"War Does Not Have a Woman's Face". Even when this book was such a success, she had to confront the critics about being an alleged pacifist and being a against the Soviet society. Other books of Alexievich are "Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War"(1991), "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" (1997), "Second Hand-Time: The last of soviets" (2013).

Personally, I recommend to read "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster", it is a really good book with an intense narrative about what happened in the disaster of Chernobyl, it is narrates since the voices of real affected ones, the people who live their lives around a nuclear power plant. 

Svetlana Alexievich