Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills’

The Belarusian Nobel laureate on the legacy of Chernobyl on its 30th anniversary, being an ‘unperson’ in her home country and writing non-fiction as literature

Svetlana Alexievich was at home in Minsk when the phone rang. For some years, she says, rumours had swirled that the Swedish Academy was considering her name. She had already received many honours. Still, it had been more than half a century since a non-fiction writer – Winston Churchill in 1953 – had won literature’s top award. The news from Stockholm was indeed stunning: Alexievich had won the 2015 Nobel prize in literature.

“This is such an important prize, such an enormous prize, you’d have to be a complete idiot to expect to win it,” she tells me. Over the next few hours the phone at her modest two-room flat in Belarus’s capital rang unceasingly. Callers included Mikhail Gorbachev, the French and German presidents, friends and well-wishers. Thousands of people wrote to her.

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