Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies. So it is precisely because her work renders meaningless the distinction she draws between documentation and art that she is now the first full-time, lifelong journalist to win the literature prize.