Her next book has already received a title, which is ‘The Marvelous Deer in the Never-Ending Hunt’, said Svetlana Alexiyevich
Nobel Prize winning Belarusian writer and publicist Svetlana Alexiyevich is writing new books that delve into love and the meaning of life. She revealed her creative plans at a meeting with readers in Moscow’s Gogol Center on Saturday.
“These will be stories about love but the main focus of the idea is a human longing for happiness,” said Alexiyevich, who has won acclaim for her technique based on the accumulating of people’s accounts of their individual lives.
She said her next book has already received a title, which is ‘The Marvelous Deer in the Never-Ending Hunt’.
“I life metaphorical titles where the overall sense has several sub-meanings,” said Alexiyevich, who writes in the Russian language. “In this case, the theme of love requires a more complicated title.”
While drafting this book, she met with hundreds of people.
“I always approach a person not as someone with regalia but as someone living today who would like to understand an event or an epoch,” Alexiyevich said. “We talk, sometimes for three to four days in a row. We talk sincerely and it’s always a long story. It’s not just as if you come to someone, jot something down, put all the commas in place and here we are, a book is ready.”
The writer, whose books are often put into the category of investigative journalism, also revealed her plans to write a book on the meaning of life.
“One more thing I’ve been considering is a book about bowing out, about a journey from here into darkness, about people’s attempts to answer a question on what happed – on what happened to them personally and to all of us as well,” Alexiyevich said.
The meeting took place in a hall booked to full capacity. The writer spoke about her books devoted to human experiences drawn from the times of war, to the importance of full non-acceptance of wars and to people stranded in the hotbeds of tensions and conflicts.
She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 “for her prolific writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”.
