YEREVAN, OCTOBER 8, ARMENPRESS. Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the 2015 Nobel prize in literature.

The chair of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, said her work was a “monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

“Armenpress” reports referring to The Guardian that she becomes the 14th woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901. The last woman to win, Canada’s Alice Munro, was handed the award in 2013.

She was born 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into a family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl. She has written short stories, essays and reportage but says she found her voice under the influence of the Belorusian writer Ales Adamovich, who developed a genre which he variously called the “collective novel”, “novel-oratorio”, “novel-evidence”, “people talking about themselves”, “epic chorus”.

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