Belarus writer Svetlana Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

She was honored "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

The literature prize has been awarded to 111 Nobel laureates between 1901 and 2014. Alexievich becomes only the 14th writer to win the award.

Alexievich will receive a $960,000 prize, The Associated Press reported, as well as a diploma and gold medal during the prize ceremony in December.

Alexievich was born 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into a family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilization from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl.

She has written short stories, essays and reportage but says she found her voice unde the influence of the Belorusian writer Ales Adamovich, who developed a genre which he variously called the “collective novel”, “novel-oratorio”, “novel-evidence”, “people talking about themselves”, “epic chorus”.

In one interviews she said: “I’ve been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotised me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world - as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realised to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.”