Literature

The medal of the Swedish Academy represents a young man sitting under a laurel tree who, enchanted, listens to and writes down the song of the Muse. The inscription reads: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes The words on the medal mean literally: It is beneficial to have improved (human) life through discovered arts. These…

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Biographical

Svetlana Alexievich was born on May 31, 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into the family of a serviceman. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilization from the army the family returned to his native Belarus and settled in a village where both her parents worked as schoolteachers. (Her…

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