Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future - Paperback

by Svetlana Alexievich (Author), Anna Gunin (Translator), Arch Tait (Translator)

From Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature: a devastating human history of the Chernobyl reactor disaster, now in an emotive new translation.

First there is the voice of the firefighter's wife, who was kept from going to her husband because he was a dangerous radioactive object. Then, the voice of an old woman unable to see why she has to leave her farm, and her village. And of course, the "clean-up crew," the soldiers and scientists for whom everything changed on that fateful day in 1986.

From the tender and intimate stories of people caring for their loved ones as they deteriorate from radiation sickness, to the moving stories of the people in the surrounding cities told suddenly to abandon their homes, Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich closely examines the human realities of the Chernobyl disaster and the half-century we have lived in its shadow.

Author Biography

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for 'her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time'.