Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ukraine in 1948 and grew up in Belarus. She's primarily a newspaper journalist, and spenther early career in Minsk compiling first-hand accounts of World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War, the fall of the Berlin Wall,and the Chernobyl meltdown. Her unflinching work - the whole of our history ... is a huge common grave and a bloodbath- earned her persecution from the Lukashenko regime, and she was forced to emigrate; she lived in Paris, Gothenburg,and Berlin before returning to Minsk in 2011. She's won a number of large prizes, including the National Book Critics CircleAward, the Prix Medicis, and the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award. In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
‘In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich
symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death,
joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century,
so tragic for their country.’
— J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature
‘Absolutely fantastic.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard
‘The non-fiction volume that has done the most to deepen the
emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of
the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history
Second-hand Time.’
— David Remnick, New Yorker
‘Second-Hand Time is [Alexievich’s] most ambitious work: many women
and a few men talk about the loss of the Soviet idea, the
post-Soviet ethnic wars, the legacy of the Gulag, and other aspects
of the Soviet experience.... Through her books and her life itself,
Alexievich has gained probably the world’s deepest, most eloquent
understanding of the post-Soviet condition.’
— Masha Gessen, New Yorker
‘A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire,
it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made
not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in
their kitchens.’
— Rachel Donadio, New York Times
‘Alexievich’s work follows the strands of thought and emotion
wherever her voices take her – through nightmares, but also flashes
of joy … The work is unique in the intimacy of the experience
transmitted through the writing: which is, after all, only the
ability to have a human ear, to listen, and to publish.’
— John Lloyd, Financial Times
‘I am engrossed in Svetlana Alexievich’s extraordinary Second-hand
Time, an oral tapestry of post-Soviet Russia.’
— Julian Barnes, Guardian
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
