Honest, daring, and sad, Alexievich’s books – containing stories in which life, broken and stolen, is worse than death – show how a woman’s perspective can humanize world problems and make them understandable to all. In some ways, Alexievich’s literary contribution, which the Nobel committee called “a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” is equal to that of the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, whom the committee recognized in 2004 for her work’s feminist critique of Austria’s Nazi past and patriarchal present.