![]() ![]() ![]() 'Absolutely essential and heartbreaking reading. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love.Ī chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget. Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. ![]() ![]() The bulk of the book is given over to monologues (and occasionally choruses) by people who lived near Chernobyl, worked on the cleanup, saw loved ones die from radiation, etc. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. The remarkable thing about Chernobyl Prayer is that Alexievich does achieve all of this. In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Svetlana Alexievich, (born May 31, 1948, Stanislav, Ukraine, U.S.S.R. Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Absolutely essential and heartbreaking reading. A new translation of Voices from Chernobyl based on the revised text. ![]()
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