Author Svetlana Alexievich holds flowers after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday. Photo: Reuters

Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich has won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her portrayal of life in the former Soviet Union, which the Swedish Academy said was “a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

Ms Alexievich’s work includes chronicles of the lives of Soviet women during the Second World War as well as of the consequences of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl and the Russian war inAfghanistan told from the perspective of ordinary citizens.

She collected hundreds of interviews of people impacted by these tumultuous events, putting them together in works that the academy said were like a “musical composition”.

“By means of her extraordinary method – a carefully composed collage of human voices – Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the academy said yesterday in awarding the 8 million crown (€862,000) prize.

Ms Alexievich, born in 1948 in Ukraine, worked as a teacher and a journalist. She lived in exile abroad for many years, including in Sweden, Germany and France, due to her criticism of the Belarus government.

Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire

“Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire,” she said in a biographical text published on her website. “But I don’t just record a dry history of events and facts, I’m writing a history of human feelings.”

Ms Alexievich's documentary style of writing first became popular in the former Soviet Union in the 1980s. But she has long been an uncomfortable writer for the authorities due to her humanistic, emotional tales of peoples' fates entangled in major historic developments. One of her best-known works is War's Unwomanly Face, which took several years to get published, as Soviet authorities saw it as undermining the myth of the Soviet army victory in World War II.