LIVE from NYPL: Svetlana Alexievich | Masha Gessen

Event Details

This event will be simultaneously interpreted in English from Russian. 

Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, is joined by author and journalist Masha Gessen in conversation to celebrate the English publication of Alexievich's book Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union. Their conversation will be conducted in Russian, and simultaneously translated into English by Anatoli Samochornov. 

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH was born in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include War’s Unwomanly Face, Zinky Boys, Chernobyl Prayer and Secondhand Time, which will be published in English for the first time in May, 2016. She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for "her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

MASHA GESSEN is a Russian and American journalist. She is the author of seven books, including The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and, most recently, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy. She is currently a Carnegie Millennial Fellow.

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