Author of book about Chechen War awarded the Nobel Prize

Writer from Belarus Svetlana Aleksievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. Among her works there are books about the Chechen War, the Chernobyl disaster and the Second World War.

Aleksievich was awarded the Nobel Prize "for her polyphonic creative work – a monument to sufferings and courage of our time", Sara Danius, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy said today in Stockholm.

Svetlana Aleksievich has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature since 2002 on the proposal of the Swedish PEN Centre for the cycle of works "The Voices of Utopia", which includes six books, namely: "War Has No Woman's Face", "The Zinc Boys”, "Charmed with Death", "Last Witnesses" and "Chernobyl Prayer". The last book of the cycle – "The Second-Hand Time" – was written in 2013, the "Vesti.Ru" reports.

The book "The Second-Hand Time" is the story about twenty human fates of the last 20 years of Russian history, and among them, the fate of the 28-year-old Olesya Nikolaeva, a junior police sergeant, narrated by her mother. The heroine, according to the excerpt from the book, published on the website "AiF" in 2009, is trying to find the truth about her daughter who perished in the Chechen War, disbelieving official version of "suicide", and gradually finds out that her daughter was shot dead at one of checkpoints not by Chechen terrorists, but by criminals, who earned on oil smuggling.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.