Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich[1] (born 31 May 1948) is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian.

[16] The International Cities of Refuge Network offered her sanctuary, and during the following decade she lived in Paris, Gothenburg and Berlin.

[17][18] Alexievich's books trace the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual through carefully constructed collages of interviews.

He also named the documentary novel I'm From Fire Village (Belarusian: Я з вогненнай вёскі) by Ales Adamovich, Janka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik, about the villages burned by the German troops during the occupation of Belarus, as the main single book that has influenced Alexievich's attitude to literature.

[25] Alexievich describes the theme of her works this way: If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath.

[24] The book was finished in 1983 and published (in short edition) in Oktyabr, a Soviet monthly literary magazine, in February 1984.

Each provides an excerpt of the Soviet-Afghan War which was disguised in the face of criticism first as political support, then intervention, and finally humanitarian aid to the Afghan people.

[30]Alexievich was not embedded with the Red Army due to her reputation in the Soviet Union; instead, she travelled to Kabul on her own prerogative during the war and gathered many accounts from veterans returning from Afghanistan.

'[31] She brings brutally honest accounts of the war to lay at the feet of the Soviet people but claims no heroism for herself: 'I went [to watch them assemble pieces of boys blown up by an anti-tank mine] and there was nothing heroic about it because I fainted there.

'[33] Alexievich was brought to trial in Minsk between 1992 and 1996, accused of distorting and falsifying the testimony of Afghan veterans and their mothers who were 'offended [...] that their boys were portrayed exclusively as soulless killer-robots, pillagers, drug addicts and rapists...' [34] The trial, while apparently defending the honour of the army and veterans, is widely seen as an attempt to preserve old ideology in post-communist Belarus.

The Belarus League for Human Rights claims that in the early 1990s, multiple cases were directed against democratically inclined intelligentsia with politically motivated verdicts.

Many people felt inseparable from the Communist ideology and were unable to accept the new order surely and the newly interpreted history.

[39] She herself rejects the notion that she is a journalist, and, in fact, Alexievich's chosen genre is sometimes called "documentary literature": an artistic rendering of real events, with a degree of poetic license.

In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.On 26 October 2019, Alexievich was elected chairman of the Belarusian PEN Center.

[44] On 9 September 2020, Alexievich alerted the press that "men in black masks" were trying to enter her apartment in central Minsk.

"[45] Diplomats from Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden began to keep a round-the-clock watch on Alexievich's home to prevent her abduction by security services.

[73] The lecture is an international platform to amplify the voices of women journalists and human rights defenders working in war and conflict zones.