Journalism as Literature: "Voices from Chernobyl," by Svetlana Alexievich

Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich speaking up forUkraine, 2022

Svetlana Alexievich takes on big subjects - the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of Communism, the Chernobyl disaster - and then insists on bringing them down to the human scale, making us look at what these colossal news headlines meant to the ordinary men, women, children, and soldiers who were involved. This is her greatness: never to forget that the art of literature - for her writing is certainly of the highest literary quality - is never larger than us.