Voces de Chernóbil

The Belarusian writer, Nobel Prize in Literature 2015, gives a voice to those who survived the Chernobyl disaster and were silenced and forgotten by their own government. This book gives them the opportunity to tell their story.

Chernobyl, 1986. "Close the windows and lie down. There's a fire at the power plant. I'll be back soon." This was the last thing a young firefighter said to his wife before going to the explosion site. He never returned. And in a way, she never saw him again, because in the hospital her husband was no longer her husband. Even today, she wonders if her story is about love or death.

Voices from Chernobyl is presented as if it were a Greek tragedy, with choruses and heroes marked by a fatal destiny, whose voices were silenced for many years by a polis represented here by the former USSR. But, unlike a Greek tragedy, there was no possibility of catharsis.

"[...] for her polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," words from the Swedish Academy's jury when awarding the author the Nobel Prize in Literature 2015.

Critics have said...
"Alexievich eloquently describes incompetence, heroism, and pain: through the monologues of her interviewees, she creates a story that the reader, however distant from the events, will be able to feel."
The Daily Telegraph

"Terrible and grotesque, the stories consolidate page after page like the radionuclides installed in the bodies of the survivors."
The New York Times

"In her books, she is able to rescue what was left under the rubble of history to write a chronicle of the future with it."
Carmen G. de la Cueva, Ahora