Alexievich, Svetlana

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ukraine three years after the Second World War. She grew up in a village in Belorussia where her Ukrainian father and Belorussian mother were teachers. She studied journalism in Minsk and later worked as a journalist and editor in Belorussia. She embarked on her magnum opus, Voices of Utopia – History of the Red Man, in the early 1980s. In 2000 she was forced to go into exile after having been harassed and pressured by the Lukashenka government at the end of the 1990s. Alexievich was able to live and work in a number of European cities, including Paris, Berlin and Gothenburg, through the International Cities of Refuge Network. She did not return to Minsk until 2011.