Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich has won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature.

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

The award, presented to a living writer, is worth 8m kronor.

Alexievich, 67, is a political writer who has often been critical of her home country’s government.

Her best-known works in English translation include Voices From Chernobyl, an oral history of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe; and Boys In Zink, a collection of first-hand accounts from the Soviet-Afghan war.

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