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WINNER of the inaugural Man Booker International literary prize, Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré, fought off a distinguished list of authors from around the world to land the £ 60,000 prize, the new global cousin of the prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction. Kadaré, born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Gjirokaster near the Greek border, is Albania's best-known poet and novelist. He has lived in France since 1990, following his decision to seek asylum stating that: "Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship." From 1986, under the Communist regime, Kadaré's work was smuggled out of Albania by his French publisher. Translations of his novels have since been published in more than 40 countries. In response to winning the prize, Kadaré said: "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 can also give rise to other kinds of news." — Agencies |
