Forty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Nobel Prize–winning author Svetlana Alexievich says Belarus is still a “laboratory” in which the long-term effects of the massive radiation leak continue to play out.
Speaking to RFE/RL’s Belarus Service, Alexievich said lessons of Chernobyl are being forgotten and more personal testimonies needed to be gathered.
“Belarus is still the Chernobyl laboratory. Chernobyl is still with us. It is impossible to forget it, because the radiation there, many radionuclides, will live for about 1,000 years,” she said. “Now is the time for testimonies, we need to collect testimonies.”
Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, interviewed more than 500 eyewitnesses for her seminal 1997 book, Voices From Chernobyl. The accounts in the book were extensively used in the landmark 2019 HBO miniseries about the tragedy.
— source rferl.org | Anna Sous | Apr 24, 2026