Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Literature prize
Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich has won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature, the BBC reports.
The prize committee called her writing "a monument to courage and suffering in our time".
The award - presented to a living writer - is worth eight million kronor (£691,000).
Previous winners include literary giants Rudyard Kipling and Ernest Hemingway and French historical author Patrick Modiano who won in 2015.
Alexievich, 67, is a political writer who is critical of her home country's government.
She is the first journalist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the chair of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, said her work was a "monument to suffering and courage in our time".
"It has been half a century since a writer working primarily in non-fiction won the Nobel - and Alexievich is the first journalist to win the award."
Alexievich's best-known works in English translation include Voices From Chernobyl, an oral history of the nuclear catastrophe; and Boys In Zink, a collection of first-hand accounts from the Soviet-Afghan war.