Ismail Kadare is among the most celebrated and awarded European writers alive today. To date, he has won the Man Booker International Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prince of Asturias Prize, and in 2016, he was appointed to the National Order of the Legion of Honour in France. Long considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kadare has been shortlisted for the prize numerous times.
Kadare was born in the southern region of what was then the Kingdom of Albania in 1936. He first began publishing short stories at the young age of 12, and released several collections of poetry as a teenager. After receiving a scholarship, Kadare traveled to Moscow to study literature, where he completed his first novel in 1959.
Returning to Tirana–the capital of Albania–Kadare continued to publish poetry and fiction, and routinely faced censorship from the authoritarian government of Enver Hoxha. As many were killed for dissenting against Hoxha's dictatorship, scholar Peter Morgan notes that Kadaré "suffered tremendously from the strain, the threats, and the terror arising from Hoxha's unpredictable moves" (10).
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Kadare established himself as a major cultural figure in Albania with novels such as The General of the Dead Army (1963) and Chronicle in Stone (1971). According to scholar Robert Elsie, a common feature across Kadaré's work is the depiction of "a remote and haunted Albania as seen through the eyes of the innocent or incomprehending foreigner" (585).
Through the late 1980s, Kadare began to speak out more publicly against the political situation in Albania. After receiving threats from the Albanian secret police, he was granted political asylum in France in 1990 where he continues to live and write.
According to scholar Robert Elsie, a common feature across Kadaré's work is the depiction of "a remote and haunted Albania as seen through the eyes of the innocent or incomprehending foreigner" (585). Broken April, Kadaré's twelfth novel, is no...
