I hope more people will become aware of her book "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster". A sad witness of a human tragedy.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Chernobyl-History-Nuclear-Disaster/dp/0312425848" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Chernobyl-History-Nuclear-Disas...</a>
Her writing is vivid and terrifying. Her _War Does Not Have a Woman's Face_ is at the top of my list of books to unread. It's a collection of accounts from female survivors of WW2 trenches. It is not pushing a feminist narrative in traditional sense (wasn't a thing in USSR) but is haunting in its honesty. Think _Saving Private Ryan_ without the humanistic takeaway.<p>She's a part of Belarusian late 20th century documentary realism tradition, where authors build around authentic, traumatic biographies of the war generation. In literature, Vasil Bykau, her contemporary, even better known domestically. In cinematography, Klimov's _Come and See_ perhaps the most known work.
Is it odd that neither the local city library and the university library don't have one of her works (pop. 320k)? She has gotten awards before, so one would think she's more popular. How political is this choice?<p>As a child of two parents who lived through WWII I recognized her sample from the book 'unchildlike stories'/'last witnesses' <a href="http://www.alexievich.info/knigi/LastWit_En.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.alexievich.info/knigi/LastWit_En.pdf</a> but on her page it seems it has only been translated into japanese and is not available in a language I (or my parents) understand, it's a pity. Another book I would like to read is 'The wonderful deer of the eternal hunt' but that doesn't seem to be ready yet (or abandoned?). In an article about her work from 15 years ago it's mentioned that she has been working on this book for 3 years now and she wants the topic to be part of her work. <a href="http://www.tol.org/client/article/8060-a-writer-from-a-cracked-world.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tol.org/client/article/8060-a-writer-from-a-crack...</a><p>Fortunately I can order 'Voices from Chernobyl' and 'War Does Not Have a Woman's Face' in paper format (only), just as well as in a way it makes the stories more memorable for me then the dead and cold e-surrogate.
I find it interesting that betting houses have gotten the winners right for a few years already.<p><a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/pulse/nobel-prize-2015-betting-odds-who-are-literature-peace-physics-favorites-2127359" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibtimes.com/pulse/nobel-prize-2015-betting-odds-w...</a><p>Something similar to the DraftKings affair maybe, where someone or several someones with insider information are using it for their advantage?<p>She wasn't a dark horse to win though, she's been favored for at least a year now:<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/nonfiction-deserves-nobel" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/nonfiction...</a><p>So it might be a case of a Prediction Game doing right<p>I remember from some years ago the Hollywood Stock Exchange ( www.hsx.com/ ), an online game where people "invested" on movies, was used as a "crowd wisdom" source for decisions on whether to fund movies, etc, and was fairly accurate IIRC.<p>Maybe there's a similar opportunity for other fields? A Startup Stock Exchange game? :)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stock_Exchange" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stock_Exchange</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market</a>
I've never read her but I assume this is where you start:<p><a href="http://lib.ru/NEWPROZA/ALEKSIEWICH/zhensk.txt" rel="nofollow">http://lib.ru/NEWPROZA/ALEKSIEWICH/zhensk.txt</a>