Belarus
BOOKSTAR AWARD
Svetlana Alexievich
Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer born in 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk (Ukraine) to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and were the basis of a dozen dramas and twenty film adaptations. She is the winner of a huge number of awards. For her polyphonic discourse, a monument to the suffering and daring of our time, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. Alexievich is the creator of a completely new, non-fiction genre. She writes a "novel of voices". Building this genre, she constantly refines the aesthetics of her documentary prose, which is based on hundreds of interviews. This skill of hers allowed her to turn the original voice of her interlocutors into an artistic condensation of the panorama of souls. In his five-volume epic, about the last hundred years of Soviet-Russian history, he has documented the experiences of several hundred people of different status and experience in the Soviet and post-Soviet world, in the form of oral history. In "Voices of Utopia", as she calls this epic, she questions the boundaries of historiography and literature, creating a text that does not coincide with the established genre canons, yet with its power it breaks through the boundaries of fiction and confirms the relevance of its content as a historical document. Aleksievich's books have been removed from school curricula in Belarus because of her political activity.
У ВОЙНЫ НЕ ЖЕНСКОЕ ЛИЦО (WAR'S UNWOMANLY FACE)
Translation: Igor Stanojoski
“BOOKSTAR” AWARD 2022
This book is a confession, a document and a record of people's memory. More than 200 women speak in it, describing how young girls, who dreamed of becoming brides, became soldiers in 1941. More than 500,000 Soviet women participated on a par with men in the Second World War, the most terrible war of the 20th century. Women not only rescued and bandaged the wounded but also fired a sniper's rifle, blew up bridges, went reconnoitering and killed... They killed the enemy who, with unprecedented cruelty, had attacked their land, their homes and their children. Soviet writer of Belarussia, Svetlana Alexiyevich spent four years working on the book, visiting over 100 cities and towns, settlements and villages and recording the stories and reminiscences of women war veterans. The Soviet press called the book"a vivid reporting of events long past, which affected the destiny of the nation as a whole."
The most important thing about the book is not so much the front-line episodes as women's heart-rending experiences in the war. Through their testimony the past makes an impassioned appeal to the present, denouncing yesterday's and today's fascism...
Other translations in Macedonian language:
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, „Begemot“, Skopje, 2016.
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, „Antolog“, Skopje, 2017.
Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, „Begemot“, Skopje, 2017.
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, „Begemot“, Skopje, 2018.