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Aleksiyevich wins Nobel Prize

Belarusian writer and journalist Svyatlana Aleksiyevich (Svetlana Alexievich) won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Announcing its decision on Thursday, the Swedish Academy said that the 67-year-old Aleksiyevich was honored "for her polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time"

Ms. Aleksiyevich, who writes in Russian, became the 14th woman to win the prestigious literature prize. The award is currently worth eight million Swedish kronor (around $960,000).

She had been mentioned among top favorites to win the prize for several years.

Ms. Aleksiyevich is best known for her documentary prose The Unwomanly Face of the War, Boys in Zink, Enchanted with Death, The Last Witnesses, and The Chernobyl Prayer (Voices from Chernobyl). All of her books are collections of first-hand accounts chronicling World War II, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Svyatlana Aleksiyevich was born to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, on May 31, 1948. After graduating from the journalism department at Belarusian State University, she worked as a reporter and journalist and a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman in Minsk.

On her personal website, she explains her pursuit of journalism: "I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves."

Ms. Aleksiyevich, an outspoken critic of Alyaksandr Lukashenka and Vladimir Putin, has periodically lived abroad, in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden, among other places.