Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare was an Albanian novelist and poet born in 1936 in Gjirokastër (the birthplace also of Enver Hoxha). He is the most important Albanian writer of the modern era and one of the great European novelists of the 20th century, whose work managed to survive and subvert the Hoxha regime's censorship through a combination of historical allegory and stylistic indirection. He defected to France in 1990. Kadare's major novels include The General of the Dead Army (1963), Broken April (1978), The Palace of Dreams (1981), The Concert (1988), The Pyramid (1992), and Spiritus (1996). His fiction uses Albanian history, folklore, and the Ottoman inheritance of the Balkans to create allegories of totalitarianism, memory, and the relationship between power and art. He was widely considered a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature for decades and received every major international literary award, including the Man Booker International Prize (2005), the Neustadt Prize (2020), and the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca (2009). He died in July 2024. Kadare is considered one of the essential voices of 20th-century European literature, a writer who maintained artistic integrity under conditions of extreme repression and who transformed Albanian history into universal allegory.