ISMAIL KADARE

The Man Booker International Prize 2005

“Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural
enemy of dictatorship”

Ismail Kadare, Albanian writer of broad international reputation who has been living in France, has won the first ever Man Booker International Prize recently. He has received the prize of £60,000 and a trophy at the Award Ceremony on 27 June 2005 in Edinburgh.

Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster near the Greek border in the south of Albania. He studied first at the University of Tirana, and then in Moscow, at the Gorky Institute for World Literature, a training school for writers and critics. Returning home in 1960 after his country broke off relations with the Soviet Union, he worked first as a journalist and also published his first poems. He then wrote a short story, which he redrafted several times before it was published as his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made his name in Albania. He was then able to become a full-time writer. He also served as editor of a literary review, Les Lettres Albanaises, published simultaneously in Albanian and in French.

He had begun his literary career in the 1950s as a poet with verse collections such as the modest Frymezimet djaloshare (Youthful inspiration, 1954) and Enderrimet (Dreams,1957) which gave proof not only of his 'youthful inspiration' but also of talent and poetic originality. His influential Shekulli im (My century, 1961) helped set the pace for renewal in Albanian verse. Perse mendohen keto male (What are these mountains thinking about, 1964) is one of the clearest expressions of Albanian self-image under the gruesome years of the Hoxha dictatorship. Kadare’s poetry was less bombastic than previous verse and gained direct access to the hearts of the readers who saw in him the spirit of the times and who appreciated the diversity of his themes. He soon became widely admired among the youth of Albania for his verse. With candidness and sincerity, he contributed in particular to the evolution of love lyrics, a genre traditionally neglected in Albanian literature.

In the sixties, Kadare turned his creative energies increasingly to prose, of which he soon became the undisputed master and by far the most popular writer of the whole of Albanian literature. He was thus the most prominent representative of Albanian literature under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha and, at the same time, its most talented adversary. His works were extremely influential throughout the seventies and eighties and, for many readers, he was the only ray of hope in the prison that was communist Albania.

Kadare was granted political asylum in France in October 1990. In support of him asylum, he said, "Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship."

His years of Parisian exile have been productive and have accorded him further success and recognition, both as a writer in Albanian and in French. He has published his collected works in ten thick volumes, each in an Albanian-language and a French-language edition, and has been honoured with membership in the prestigious Académie Française.
Kadare's works are published in France by Editions Fayard. The first eleven volumes of his Complete Works are now in print in Albanian and in French. Translations of Kadare's novels have been published in more than forty countries and for some years Ismail Kadare has been considered as one of the greatest writers of his epoch.

He is a writer who “maps a whole culture - its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer," said Professor John Carey, Chair of the judges. In response to winning the prize, Kadaré comments: "I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness - armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on. My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realise that this region, to which my country, Albania, belongs, can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the field of the arts, literature and civilisation.”

Other writers who were nominated for the International Booker Prize this year were Margaret Atwood (Canada), Saul Bellow (USA: passed away on 5 April 2005), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Gunter Grass (Germany), Milan Kundera (Czech), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Doris Lessing (UK), Ian McEwan (UK), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Tomas Eloy Martinez (Argentina), Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), Cynthia Ozick (USA), Philip Roth (USA), Muriel Spark (Scotland), Antonio Tabucchi (Italy), John Updike (USA), A.B. Yehoshua (Israel).

The following of Kadare’s titles have been translated into English: The General of the Dead Army, The Three Arched Bridge, Broken April, Chronicle in Stone, Durontine, The File on H, The Concert, The Palace of Dreams, Albanian Spring, The Pyramid, Elegy for Kosovo, Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, The Successor (forthcoming, January 2006), Agamemnon's Daughter (forthcoming, date TBC)