8.8 /10 1 Votes
Language Russian Publication date 1997 OCLC 39281739 | 4.4/5 Goodreads Publisher Ostozhʹe Originally published 1997 Original title Чернобыльская молитва Genres History, Non-fiction | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Awards National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction Similar Zinky boys, Secondhand Time: The Last of th, Boys in Zinc, Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle, Guns - Germs - and Steel | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future (UK title) / Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (US title) is a book by Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in 1986 at the time of the Chernobyl disaster. (At the time Belarus was part of the Soviet Union as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.)
Alexievich, then in her 30s, interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses, including firefighters, liquidators (members of the cleanup team), politicians, physicians, physicists and ordinary citizens over a period of 10 years. The book relates the psychological and personal tragedy of the Chernobyl accident, and explores the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives.
Chernobyl Prayer was first published in Russian in 1997 as Чернобыльская молитва and a revised, updated edition came out in 2013. The American translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction.