Chernobyl Prayer

A haunting history of the Chernobyl disaster by the winner of the Nobel prize in literatureOn 26 April 1986 the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occured in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. While the official Soviet narrative downplayed the accident's impact, Svetlana Alexievich wanted to know how people understood it. She recorded hundreds of interviews with workers at the nuclear plant, refugees and resettlers, scientists and bureaucrats, crafting their monologues into a stunning oral history of the nuclear disaster. What their stories reveal is the fear, anger and uncertainty with which they still live but also a dark humour and desire to see the beauty of everyday life, including that of Chernobyl's new landscape. A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer is a haunting masterpiece.

“A collage of oral testimony that turns into the psycho”

Alexievich is both a mighty documentarian and a mighty artist -- Philip Gourevitch New Yorker Awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Svetlana Alexievich is a brilliant choice that recalibrates the status of "non-fiction" in the literary canon -- Arifa Akbar Independent Svetlana Alexievich is the voice of modern Russia... The news that she is the receiver of this year's Nobel prize in literature came as a rewarding surprise, not only because it reminds us that serious reporting is not dead in the Internet age, but also because it bestows a poetic quality to the journalistic endeavor -- Michael Skafidas Huffington Post

Svetlana Alexievich (Author)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, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). 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'.

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