Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist, and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was born on 31 May 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian, and Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers. She studied journalism at the University of Minsk and worked as a teacher, journalist, and editor.

Alexievich's criticism of the political regimes in the Soviet Union and later in Belarus has periodically forced her to live abroad, spending time in countries such as Italy, France, Germany, and Sweden. She depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experiences of individuals, using interviews to create a collage of voices in her books, which are often described as "documentary novels."

In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time," becoming the first writer from Belarus to receive the award.