Serhii Plokhy, who on Nov. 14 won the Baillie Gifford non-fiction prize for Chornobyl: History of a Tragedy, always intended to write about the world’s worst nuclear disaster, not least because he lived through it. “I was there at the time,” he says of his days as a young university lecturer living 500km downstream from the explosion at the Ukrainian nuclear plant in 1986 that contaminated vast swaths of Europe, worrying if the waters of the Dnieper River had been contaminated. “I remember the horror.”
Chornobyl
The Guardian: Serhii Plokhy says ‘Chornobyl exposed Soviet secrecy’
A police officer checks the level of radioactivity on vehicles leaving the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around Chornobyl on May 10, 1986.
