Tapestry | Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich

The Memory Keeper

Featured in The New Yorker

“Please bring the lady one green tea,” went the request. “She has won the Nobel Prize.” Svetlana Alexievich, the sixty-seven-year-old winner of this year’s prize in literature...


Voices from Chernobyl

Featured in The Paris Review

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 A.M., a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technical disaster of the twentieth century.


The Man Who Flew Like a Bird

Featured in The New York Review of Books

Over the course of several decades and numerous books, Alexievich has pursued a distinctive kind of narrative based on journalistic research and the distillation of thousands of firsthand interviews with people directly affected by all the major events of the Soviet and post-Soviet period.


Boys in Zinc

Featured in Granta

In 1986 I had decided not to write about war again. For a long time after I finished my book War’s Unwomanly Face I couldn’t bear to see a child with a bleeding nose. I suppose each of us has a measure of protection against pain; mine had been exhausted.


Second-Hand Time

Featured in Times Literary Supplement

Communism had an insane plan: to remake the ‘old breed of man’, ancient Adam. And it really worked … Perhaps it was communism’s only achievement.


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