Belorussian journalist Sviatlana Alexievich wins Nobel Prize for literature

Veteran journalist Sviatlana Alexievich's was awarded today the Nobel Prize for literature. Her most famous works include Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe and Zinky Boys, about Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Persecuted by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorial regime she was forced to leave the country in 2000 and returned in 2011. "For me personally Sviatlana is a subtle connoisseur of a human nature. Each of her line compels to think. She can touch the most sensitive strings, raise the deepest feelings of the mind. She makes her readers realize what they have only felt by intuition”  said Zhanna Litvina, ex-chair of the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ), an IFJ affiliate.