Svetlana Alexievich was born in the Ukraine and studied journalism at the University of Minsk. Her books, including Voices from Chernobyl, document the emotional history of Soviet and post-Soviet life through interviews. Alexievich has received numerous awards for her writing, including a prize from the Swedish PEN Institute for "courage and dignity as a writer." She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015 "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."
Translator Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel A Terrible Country and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
"Grim and grotesque, the stories accrete across the pages like the
radionuclides lodged in the bodies of those who survived."
--Nicholas Confessore, The New York Times Book Review
"Svetlana Alexievich's remarkable book, recording the lives and
deaths of her fellow Belarussians, has at last made it into
American bookstores... Hers is a peerless collection of testimony."
--Andrew Meier, The Nation"Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from
Chernobyl (Dalkey Archive) is a collage of oral testimony that
turns into the psycho�biography of a nation not shown on any map:
the poisoned territory where live Belarusians, Ukrainians and
Russians who are forever changed by the catastophe. The book--by
this year's Nobelist--leaves radiation burns on the brain."
--Julian Barnes, The Guardian, Best Books of the Year"A chorus of
fatalism, stoic bravery, and black, black humor is sounded in this
haunting oral history . . . The result is an endelible X-ray of the
Russian soul." --Publishers Weekly"Shocking accounts of life in a
poisoned world. And what quintessentially human stories these are,
as each distinct voice expresses anger, fear, ignorance, stoicism,
valor, compassion, and love. Alexievich put her own health at risk
to gather these invaluable frontline testimonies, which she has
transmuted into a haunting and essential work of literature that
one can only hope documents a never-to-be-repeated catastrophe."
--Booklist (Starred Review)"It was the stories of those who
suffered that most interested Alexievich. The [HBO] series actually
makes use of one of the stories in her book: the story of Lyudmilla
Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley), who broke the rules by staying with her
firefighter husband in the hospital until he died, even though she
was pregnant. (She lied about it.) Her baby lived for four hours
after birth; she had apparently absorbed the radiation, saving her
mother's life. Ignatenko's monologue in Alexievich's book is some
of the most memorable reading I have ever done." --Masha Gessen,
The New Yorker
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