The Unwomanly Face of War

📗 Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for 'her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time'.

Alexievich set out to write The Unwomanly Face of War, her first book, when she realized that she grew up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War but whose stories were absent from official narratives. She spent years interviewing dozens of Soviet women - captains, tank drivers, snipers, pilots, nurses and doctors -who had experienced the war on the front lines, on the home front and in occupied territories, bringing to light their memories.

After completing the manuscript in 1983, Alexievich was not allowed to publish it because it went against the official history of the war. With the dawn of Perestroika, a heavily censored edition came out in 1985 and it became a huge bestseller in the Soviet Union. Alexievich s other works, all built around interviews conducted over many years, include Last Witnesses (1985), Boysin/jnc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013).