Nobel Prize For Literature Is Awarded To Svetlana Alexievich, Belarusian Author

This year's Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded by The Royal Swedish Academy on Thursday to Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," noted the Nobel Prize's website.

The 67-year-old is the 14th woman out of 107 authors to win the Nobel Literature Prize, reported The New York Times.

Her oral history is her most evocative genre in "Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster," translated into English by writer Keith Gessen, according to BBC News. It was a technique that took inspiration from the Russian oral storytelling tradition

Being a journalist and historian, she has blended both genres in her book.

"Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire," she said. "Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life."

She explains that "I'm writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details."

"And my genre, I refer to it as 'the novel of voices' and you might say that my work as just simply lying on the ground and I go and I gather it and pick it up and I put it together. If Flaubert said 'I am a man of the pen - or the plume,' I could say of myself that I am a person of the ear."

Alexievich is awarded a little more than $1 million.