A photo taken on November 14, 2014 shows Belarusian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich during her visit a the Ukrainian embassy in Minsk. Little-known Alexievich won the 2015 prize for her account on women’s experiences in the Second World War.
When the winning writer was eventually tapped last Thursday morning (Chicago time), the name didn’t sound like a Swedish mispronunciation of Ngugi’s unique name. I had to wait for news agencies to spell that unfamiliar nomenclature, and when they did, I couldn’t remember ever reading any work by Svetlana Alexievich.
It gives me no comfort that as a product of a Kenyan education system whose high-school geography and history syllabuses glorified the capitalist regions of Europe, I’m among the people who had not heard about Alexievich’s country, formerly a part of the Soviet Union, now a country of less than 10 million people bordering Russia, Poland and Ukraine.
To confess, at first I thought “Belarusian” (Alexievich nationality) was the author’s baptismal name — something like Belarusian Nyambura wa Waiyaki in a future Ngugi novel.
Last year’s prize went to a writer equally not widely known outside his country, the Frenchman Patrick Modiano. But at least Modiano had been mentioned in major works about 20th-century French literature. Not so this year’s winner.
Even good libraries in the West didn’t have Alexievich’s books; I had to wait for days before I could get my copies. Her writing is cited in only a handful of English-language journals, none of them a major platform for literary scholars.
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