2015 Nobel Prize in Literature
- 8 October 2015 (2015-10-08) (announcement)
- 10 December 2015
(ceremony)
← 2014 · | Nobel Prize in Literature | · 2016 → |
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich (born 1948) "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time".[1][2] She is described as the first journalist and the first Belarusian national to receive the Nobel prize since December 10, 2015.[3]
Laureate
Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In her books, she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. With her "documentary novels", Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. Her major works includes the Chernobylskaya molitva ("Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster", 1997) and U voyny ne zhenskoe litso ("The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II", 1985). Her books criticize political regimes in both the Soviet Union and later Belarus as in Vremya sekond khend ("Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets", 2013).[4][5]
"Documentary Literature"
Alexievich herself rejects the notion that she is a journalist, and, in fact, Alexievich's chosen genre is sometimes called "documentary literature": an artistic rendering of real events, with a degree of poetic license.[6] In her own words:
"I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher."
Nobel lecture and award ceremony
Alexievich delivered a Nobel lecture on December 7, 2015 entitled On the Battle Lost, which was originally in Russian. In her lecture, she depicted life during and after the Soviet Union through the various experience of individuals based on interviews and creating them into collages of memories.[7]
Sara Danius, in the presentation of the award, said:
"Alexievich uncovers the face of evil in a truth process where 'heat incinerates the lies' and in language that, between the lines, conveys the silence of pain. She waits until the voices lodge in her, acquiring a harder sheen. This makes her the most sensitive of contemporary historians and a genre innovator."[8]
Gallery
- 8 October 2015: Announcement of the 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature in Stockholm by the Permanent Secretary Sara Danius.
References
- ^ The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 nobelprize.org
- ^ Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Literature prize Archived 2018-06-21 at the Wayback Machine, by BBC
- ^ Alison Flood, Luke Harding and agencies (8 October 2015). "Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literature". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 March 2021.
- ^ Svetlana Alexievich – Facts nobelprize.org
- ^ Svetlana Alexievich britannica.org
- ^ Pinkham, Sophie (29 August 2016). "Witness Tampering". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 30 August 2016. Retrieved 30 August 2016.
- ^ Nobel lecture 2015 nobelprize.org
- ^ Ceremony speech nobelprize.org
External links
- Prize announcement 2015 nobelprize.org
- Award Ceremony nobelprize.org
- Award ceremony speech nobelprize.org
- v
- t
- e
- 1901: Sully Prudhomme
- 1902: Theodor Mommsen
- 1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
- 1904: Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray
- 1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz
- 1906: Giosuè Carducci
- 1907: Rudyard Kipling
- 1908: Rudolf Eucken
- 1909: Selma Lagerlöf
- 1910: Paul Heyse
- 1911: Maurice Maeterlinck
- 1912: Gerhart Hauptmann
- 1913: Rabindranath Tagore
- 1914
- 1915: Romain Rolland
- 1916: Verner von Heidenstam
- 1917: Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan
- 1918
- 1919: Carl Spitteler
- 1920: Knut Hamsun
- 1921: Anatole France
- 1922: Jacinto Benavente
- 1923: W. B. Yeats
- 1924: Władysław Reymont
- 1925: George Bernard Shaw
- 1926: Grazia Deledda
- 1927: Henri Bergson
- 1928: Sigrid Undset
- 1929: Thomas Mann
- 1930: Sinclair Lewis
- 1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt (posthumously)
- 1932: John Galsworthy
- 1933: Ivan Bunin
- 1934: Luigi Pirandello
- 1935
- 1936: Eugene O'Neill
- 1937: Roger Martin du Gard
- 1938: Pearl S. Buck
- 1939: Frans Eemil Sillanpää
- 1940
- 1941
- 1942
- 1943
- 1944: Johannes V. Jensen
- 1945: Gabriela Mistral
- 1946: Hermann Hesse
- 1947: André Gide
- 1948: T. S. Eliot
- 1949: William Faulkner
- 1950: Bertrand Russell
- 1951: Pär Lagerkvist
- 1952: François Mauriac
- 1953: Winston Churchill
- 1954: Ernest Hemingway
- 1955: Halldór Laxness
- 1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez
- 1957: Albert Camus
- 1958: Boris Pasternak
- 1959: Salvatore Quasimodo
- 1960: Saint-John Perse
- 1961: Ivo Andrić
- 1962: John Steinbeck
- 1963: Giorgos Seferis
- 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award)
- 1965: Mikhail Sholokhov
- 1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs
- 1967: Miguel Ángel Asturias
- 1968: Yasunari Kawabata
- 1969: Samuel Beckett
- 1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- 1971: Pablo Neruda
- 1972: Heinrich Böll
- 1973: Patrick White
- 1974: Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson
- 1975: Eugenio Montale
- 1976: Saul Bellow
- 1977: Vicente Aleixandre
- 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer
- 1979: Odysseas Elytis
- 1980: Czesław Miłosz
- 1981: Elias Canetti
- 1982: Gabriel García Márquez
- 1983: William Golding
- 1984: Jaroslav Seifert
- 1985: Claude Simon
- 1986: Wole Soyinka
- 1987: Joseph Brodsky
- 1988: Naguib Mahfouz
- 1989: Camilo José Cela
- 1990: Octavio Paz
- 1991: Nadine Gordimer
- 1992: Derek Walcott
- 1993: Toni Morrison
- 1994: Kenzaburō Ōe
- 1995: Seamus Heaney
- 1996: Wisława Szymborska
- 1997: Dario Fo
- 1998: José Saramago
- 1999: Günter Grass
- 2000: Gao Xingjian
- 2001: V. S. Naipaul
- 2002: Imre Kertész
- 2003: J. M. Coetzee
- 2004: Elfriede Jelinek
- 2005: Harold Pinter
- 2006: Orhan Pamuk
- 2007: Doris Lessing
- 2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio
- 2009: Herta Müller
- 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa
- 2011: Tomas Tranströmer
- 2012: Mo Yan
- 2013: Alice Munro
- 2014: Patrick Modiano
- 2015: Svetlana Alexievich
- 2016: Bob Dylan
- 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro
- 2018: Olga Tokarczuk
- 2019: Peter Handke
- 2020: Louise Glück
- 2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah
- 2022: Annie Ernaux
- 2023: Jon Fosse
- 2024: to be announced