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This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the chair of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, called Svetlana Alexievich’s writing “a monument to courage and suffering in our time”.

The award, presented to a living writer, is worth 8 million kronor ($1.1 million).

Previous winners include literary heavyweights Rudyard Kipling and Ernest Hemingway. French historical author Patrick Modiano won in 2014.

It has been half a century since a writer working primarily in non-fiction won the Nobel – and Svetlan Alexievich is the first journalist to win the award.

Her best-known works in English translation include Voices From Chernobyl, an oral history of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe; and Boys In Zinc, a collection of first-hand accounts from the Soviet-Afghan war. The title refers to the zinc coffins in which the dead came home.

Boys In Zinc caused controversy and outrage when it was first published in Russia, where reviewers called it a “slanderous piece of fantasy” and part of a “hysterical chorus of malign attacks”.

Svetlana Alexievich has also been critical of the Belarusian government, leading to a period of persecution – in which her telephone was bugged and she was banned from making public appearances.

Photo Getty Images

Photo Getty Images

She spent 10 years in exile from 2000, living in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden, among other places, before moving back to Minsk.

Svetlana Alexievich was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankivsk, then known as Stanislav, to a Belarusian father and Ukrainian mother.

The family moved to Belarus after her father completed his military service, and Svetlana Alexievich studied journalism at the University of Minsk between 1967 and 1972.

After graduation, she worked as a journalist for several years before publishing her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face, in 1985.

Based on interviews with hundreds of women who participated in the World War Two, it set a template for her future works, constructing narratives from witnesses to some the world’s most devastating events.

On her personal website, Svetlana Alexievich explains her pursuit of journalism: “I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves.”

She has previously won the Swedish PEN prize for her “courage and dignity as a writer”.

Sara Danius said Svetlana Alexievich had spent nearly 40 years studying the people of the former Soviet Union, but that her work was not only about history but “something eternal, a glimpse of eternity”.

“By means of her extraordinary method – a carefully composed collage of human voices – Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era,” the Swedish Academy added.

Svetlana Alexievich was the bookmakers’ favorite to win 2015 Nobel award, according to Ladbrokes.

She beat other hot favorites Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.

Svetlana Alexievich is the 14th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in its history.

A total of 112 individuals have won it between 1901 and 2015. The prize was suspended several times during the first and second world wars.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Japanese Takaaki Kajita and Canadian Arthur B. McDonald “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”.

Neutrinos are ubiquitous subatomic particles with almost no mass and which rarely interact with anything else, making them very difficult to study.

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald led two teams which made key observations of the particles inside big underground instruments in Japan and Canada.

They were named on October 6 at a news conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Goran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which decides on the award, declared: “This year’s prize is about changes of identity among some of the most abundant inhabitants of the Universe.”

Prof. Arthur McDonald is a professor of particle physics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He said hearing the news was “a very daunting experience”.

“Fortunately, I have many colleagues as well, who share this prize with me,” he added.

“[It’s] a tremendous amount of work that they have done to accomplish this measurement.

“We have been able to add to the world’s knowledge at a very fundamental level.”

Prof. Takaaki Kajita, from the University of Tokyo, described the win as “kind of unbelievable”. He said he thought his work was important because it had contradicted previous assumptions.

“I think the significance is – clearly there is physics that is beyond the Standard Model.”

In the late 1990s, physicists were faced with a mystery: all their Earth-based detectors were picking out far fewer neutrinos than theoretical models predicted – based on how many should be produced by distant nuclear reactions, from our own Sun to far-flung supernovas.

Photo NobelPrize

Photo NobelPrize

Those detectors mostly entail huge volumes of fluid, buried deep underground to avoid interference. When such a vast space is littered with light detectors, neutrinos can be glimpsed because of the tiny flashes of light that occur when they – very occasionally – bump into an atom.

They include the Super-Kamiokande detector beneath Japan’s Mount Kamioka, where Prof. Takaaki Kajita still works, and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada, run by Prof. Arthur McDonald. Both are housed in disused mines.

In 1998, Prof. Takaaki Kajita’s team reported that neutrinos they had caught, bouncing out of collisions in the Earth’s atmosphere, had switched identity: they were a different “flavor” from what those collisions must have released.

Then in 2001, the group led by Prof. Arthur McDonald announced that the neutrinos they were detecting in Ontario, which started out in the Sun, had also “flipped” from their expected identity.

This discovery of the particle’s wobbly flavors had crucial implications. It explained why neutrino detections had not matched the predicted quantities – and it meant that the baffling particles must have a mass.

This contradicted the Standard Model of particle physics and changed calculations about the nature of the Universe, including its eternal expansion.

Prof. Olga Botner, a member of the prize committee from Uppsala University, said although the work was done by huge teams of physicists, the prize went to two of the field’s pioneers.

She said Prof. Arthur McDonald had proposed and overseen the building of the Sudbury observatory in the 1980s, and been its director since 1990.

“He has been the organizational and intellectual leader of this venture.”

Prof. Takaaki Kajita, meanwhile, did his PhD research at Kamiokande and then led the atmospheric neutrino group, “trying to make sense of the data they were getting” in the late 1990s.

The total number of Nobel physics laureates recognized since 1901 is now 201, including only two women.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences also decides on the chemistry Nobel – announced tomorrow.

The first of the 2015 Nobel Prizes, for physiology or medicine, was awarded on Monday by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet. It was shared by researchers who developed pioneering drugs against parasitic diseases.

Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt, who said that scientists should work in gender-segregated labs, has resigned from his position as honorary professor at University College London (UCL).

Sir Tim Hunt made comments about the “trouble with girls” in science because they cause men to fall in love with them.

UCL said Tim Hunt – a Royal Society fellow – had resigned from his position within its faculty of life sciences.

Tim Hunt, 72, also said at a conference in South Korea that women in labs “cry” when criticized and “fall in love” with male counterparts.Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt resigns from UCL role

A statement from the university read: “UCL can confirm that Sir Tim Hunt FRS has resigned from his position as honorary professor with the UCL faculty of life sciences following comments he made about women in science at the World Conference of Science Journalists on June 9.

“UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality.”

Tim Hunt – who was awarded the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 2001 for his work on how cells divide – reportedly told the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls.

“Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

The British biochemist, who was knighted in 2006, said the remarks were “intended as a light-hearted, ironic comment” but had been “interpreted deadly seriously by my audience”.

Tim Hunt also admitted that he had a reputation for being a “chauvinist”.