Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy made the announcement.
"The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2015 is awarded to the Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."
Danius said Alexievich is not interested in simply recounting events. The events she covers, for example, the Chernobyl disaster and the Second World War, are just a pretext for exploring what history does to the individual and where individual life intersects with the course of historical events.
"What she is really interested in is the soul of events, of the inner life of individuals, that's what she has been uncovering book after book.”
Alexievich was born on May 31, 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk, the daughter of a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. When her father had completed his military service, the family moved to Belarus, where both parents worked as teachers.
Alexievich worked as a teacher and as a journalist, and she studied journalism at the University of Minsk.
"She has conducted thousands of interviews over the years with man and women and children, she always keeps herself in the background unlike most journalists."
Danius recommended that people read her first book "War's Unwomenly Face" translated into English in 1988. It was about one million Soviet women in the red army who participated in the Second World War alongside male soldiers.
Alexievich's book voices of Utopia and voices from Chernobyl about nuclear proliferation are also recommended by Danius.
For CRI, this is Chen Xuefei reporting from Stockholm.
