Authors Like Svetlana Alexievich

Ales Adamovich

Belarusian · b. 1927 · Writer

Adamovich fought with the Belarusian partisans as a teenager. With Yanka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik he recorded survivors of the villages the Nazis burned with their people inside, and published their testimony as I Am from the Fiery Village; with Daniil Granin he did the same for the siege of Leningrad. He co-wrote the screenplay of Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985). Alexievich has named him as her main teacher. The source of the method. Adamovich showed that a tape recorder and an editor's patience could do what fiction about the war could not. Read him to see where her books come from — and why both of them start in Belarus, where a quarter of the population died in the war.

Studs Terkel

American · b. 1912 · Oral historian · Pulitzer 1985

Terkel was a Chicago radio host who spent decades recording ordinary Americans talking about their lives. Hard Times is the Depression, Working is more than a hundred people describing their jobs, and “The Good War”, an oral history of the Second World War, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. The closest Western equivalent, and a useful contrast. Terkel's speakers are mostly allowed to stay themselves; Alexievich shapes hers into something nearer to tragedy. Read “The Good War” next to The Unwomanly Face of War and you get the same war remembered by two very different countries.

Studs Terkel books in order, and where I'd start →

Vasily Grossman

Soviet · b. 1905 · Novelist and reporter

Grossman was the Red Army newspaper's correspondent at Stalingrad and with the advance to Berlin, and his 1944 report “The Hell of Treblinka” was one of the first accounts of a death camp. Life and Fate, his novel of Stalingrad, set Nazi and Soviet terror side by side; the KGB confiscated the manuscript in 1961, and it was published only in 1980, abroad. Alexievich's war books are full of people who could not say in public what Grossman wrote and was suppressed for. Life and Fate is the fiction that tells the same truth as The Unwomanly Face of War, at epic length, and it was written by a man who had been there with a notebook.

Varlam Shalamov

Soviet · b. 1907 · Short-story writer

Shalamov spent roughly seventeen years in Soviet prison camps, most of them in the gold mines of Kolyma in the far north-east. Kolyma Stories are short, flat, exact pieces about survival there, written after his release and circulated in samizdat; they were not published in full in Russia until after his death in 1982. Secondhand Time keeps returning to people whose parents or grandparents went into the camps. Shalamov is what they would have said. He refuses every redemptive story — that suffering ennobles, that the camp teaches anything — and that refusal is the same moral position Alexievich takes when she lets a witness speak without explaining them.

Anna Politkovskaya

Russian · b. 1958 · Reporter

Politkovskaya reported from Chechnya for Novaya Gazeta through the second war there, collecting testimony from civilians, soldiers and the families of the disappeared. She was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006. Alexievich listens after the event; Politkovskaya listened while it was still happening and put her name to it. Her books are rougher and angrier, but they are built the same way — one person's account after another until the official version cannot stand — and they show what that cost in Russia.

Anna Politkovskaya books in order, and where I'd start →

Elena Kostyuchenko

Russian · b. 1987 · Reporter

Kostyuchenko worked for Novaya Gazeta for seventeen years, reporting on the parts of Russia its government preferred not to show, and was in Ukraine when the paper was forced to suspend publication in 2022. I Love Russia collects that reporting. In 2026 she was the interviewer for Alexievich's Paris Review interview. The writer closest to Alexievich working in Russian now. Her pieces are built from people's own words — sex workers, miners, the families of soldiers — and she is open about how her own life and politics shape what she hears. Read her to see where the tradition went after 2022.

Ryszard Kapuściński

Polish · b. 1932 · Reporter · Prince of Asturias Award 2003

Kapuściński was the Polish Press Agency's correspondent across Africa, Latin America and Asia. The Emperor is Haile Selassie's court told through the voices of his former servants; Imperium is his journeys through the Soviet Union as it ended. In 2010 his biographer Artur Domosławski showed that he had invented or embellished parts of his reportage. The Emperor is the book that most resembles hers in form — a regime remembered by the people who served it — and Imperium covers the same collapse as Secondhand Time. Read him knowing what Domosławski found: he is a great writer, but not always a reliable witness, which is the line Alexievich has always been careful about.

Ryszard Kapuściński books in order, and where I'd start →

John Hersey

American · b. 1914 · Reporter and novelist · Pulitzer 1945

In August 1946 The New Yorker gave an entire issue to Hersey's account of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, told through six survivors — a clerk, a doctor, a widowed seamstress, a German priest, a young surgeon and a Methodist minister — from the moment of the flash onwards. He went back to them forty years later and added a final chapter. The model for Voices from Chernobyl: a technological catastrophe told not by experts but by the people it happened to, in their own sequence of hours and days. Hersey keeps himself out of the book as completely as Alexievich does, and it is short enough to read in an evening.

Philip Gourevitch

American · b. 1961 · Reporter · National Book Critics Circle Award 1998

Gourevitch went to Rwanda in 1995, a year after the genocide, and spent the following years interviewing survivors, perpetrators, officials and aid workers. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998. Alexievich asks what a society tells itself after mass death; Gourevitch asks the same question in Rwanda. He is far more present as a narrator and more willing to argue, but the core of the book is the same — people explaining, in their own words, what they saw and what they did.

Philip Gourevitch books in order, and where I'd start →

Anne Applebaum

American-Polish · b. 1964 · Historian · Pulitzer 2004

Applebaum is a historian and journalist who has written the standard English-language histories of the Soviet camp system and of the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. Gulag: A History won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Read her when you want the archive behind the voices. Alexievich deliberately gives no dates, numbers or context; Applebaum gives all of them. The two are complementary — Gulag explains the system that Secondhand Time's speakers grew up in, and neither book is complete without the other.