In April 1986, a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come.





While the official Soviet narrative downplayed the consequences, Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, spent years collecting testimonies from survivors: clean-up workers, firefighters, widows, children growing up in the disaster's long shadow, assembling their voices into a haunting oral history full of fear and anger, but also extraordinary tenderness, courage and wisdom.





A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer is a deeply humane masterpiece that bears witness to the catastrophe's indelible impact, raising profound questions about humanity and nature, community, power and sacrifice.



Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankovsk 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 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'.