Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has made a list of books he was deeply impressed by in 2016.
The list includes six works. All of them were published in 2016. Secondhand Time, the latest book by Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is also on Poroshenko’s list.
“No one taught us freedom. They taught us only how to die for freedom,” the Ukrainian leader quoted the Belarusian Nobel laureate.
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul.”
Belsat TV program about Alexievich’s Club of Intellectuals
Svetlana Alexievich is a Soviet and Belarusian investigative journalist and prose writer. Her most notable works are War’s Unwomanly Face (monologues of women in the war speaking about the aspects of the Second World War which were hardly mentiond before), Zinky Boys (first-hand accounts from the war in Afghanistan ).
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After persecution by Lukashenka regime, she left Belarus in 2000. The International Cities of Refuge Network offered her sanctuary and during the following decade she lived in Paris, Berlin and Gothenburg. In 2011 Alexievich moved back to Minsk.
In 2013, after receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Union the writer said that the Belarusian government ‘took no notice of her’.
Belsat TV was be the only Belarusian television channel broadcasting online the ceremony of Svetlana Alexievich receiving the Nobel award for literature. State-run Belteleradiocompany, ONT and STV ignored the event.
More: State-run TV turns blind eye to Alexievich while Belsat shows all – Belarus Nobel laureate’s countrymen
