Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

CHERNOBYL PRAYER

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk 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. She started out as a journalist and developed her own non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), chronicles the experience of Soviet women during the Second World War, while her second volume, Last Witnesses (1985), focuses on the same period seen through the eyes of Soviet children. They were followed by Boys in Zinc (1991), an account of the effects of war – specifically the Soviet war in Afghanistan – on soldiers, their families and society, and Chernobyl Prayer (1997), which features a series of monologues by people who were affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Her most recent book is Second-Hand Time (2013), a chronicle of post-Soviet life. She has won numerous international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time’.

Anna Gunin’s recent translations include Oleg Pavlov’s award-winning Requiem for a Soldier (2015) and Mikail Eldin’s war memoirs The Sky Wept Fire (2012). Her translations of Pavel Bazhov’s folk tales appear in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (2012), shortlisted for the 2014 Rossica Prize.

Arch Tait has translated thirty books, short stories and essays by most of today’s leading Russian writers. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia (2004) was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010. Most recently, he has translated Mikhail Gorbachev’s The New Russia (2016).