Who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Concept: The Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the five original Nobel Prizes created under Alfred Nobel's 1895 will. It has been awarded by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm most years since it was first given in 1901 (a small number of years, mostly during the two World Wars, saw no award) to an author who has produced "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" in the field of literature. Unlike a themed or single-work prize, it recognizes a writer's overall body of work, decided after a year-long nomination and evaluation process by the Academy's Nobel Committee for Literature.

Application: For 2015, the Swedish Academy announced its decision on 8 October 2015 in favour of Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and non-fiction prose writer, "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time." Her major works, including War's Unwomanly Face and Voices from Chernobyl, assemble first-person oral testimonies into a documentary form of literature, an approach the Academy recognized as a distinctive literary genre.

Cross-check: Comparing this against the other offered names by their own award years and records rules them out for 2015:

• Mario Vargas Llosa (a Peruvian-Spanish novelist) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, five years earlier, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."

• Herta Müller (a German-Romanian novelist and poet) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, for depicting, in the citation's words, "the landscape of the dispossessed."

• Patrick Modiano (a French novelist) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, one year before 2015, "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation."

Result: Only Svetlana Alexievich's award year matches 2015, confirming her as the correct laureate for this question.