The Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm, Sweden, has awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Literature to Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, for what the Nobel Committee called "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."
Alexievich has written books on the human impact of the Chernobyl disaster, the war in Afghanistan, and Soviet and post-Soviet history. Her work relies heavily on oral history and first-person perspective.