TIRANA, Albania – Albanian novelist and poet Ismail Kadare, whose irreverent works from within communist Albania earned him international renown and the repression of the country’s dictatorship, has died in Tirana, the editor of his publication said on Monday. He was 88 years old.
Kadare won a series of international awardsand has long been mentioned as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.
Albanian President Bajram Begaj praised Kadare as the country’s “spiritual emancipator.”
“Albania and the Albanians have lost their genius of letters… the Balkans (lost) the poet of their myths, Europe and the world (lost) one of the most renowned representatives of modern literature,” Begaj said in a statement released by your office. .
Albania’s government has declared two days of national mourning on Tuesday and Wednesday, when flags will be flown at half-mast. A minute’s silence will be observed across the country on Wednesday after Kadare’s funeral.
Onufri Publishing House editor Bujar Hudhri said the author died on Monday morning after being rushed to a hospital.
A nurse at the hospital said he was taken to the emergency room after suffering cardiac arrest. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media.
Kadare became internationally recognized after his novel “The Dead Army General” – which later inspired a film starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimee – was published in 1963. The book told the story of an Italian general who was sent to Albania to find and repatriate the bones of thousands of his compatriots killed there during the Second World War, and who insists on the futility of the task and the war.
At the time, Albania was still ruled by the communist government of the late dictator Enver Hoxha, who transformed the small, mountainous Balkan country into the most isolated in Europe.
Famous for the delicate writing of his novels, Kadare fled to France in the autumn of 1990, just months before the collapse of the communist regime following student protests in December. He lived in Paris and had recently returned to Tirana, the Albanian capital.
During a visit to Albania last year, French President Emmanuel Macron awarded him the Title of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. France had also previously made him a foreign associate of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, as well as Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Kadare has received numerous international awards, including the first International Booker Prize in 2005. His works, which included more than 80 novels, plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, and story collections, have been translated into 45 languages.
Born on January 28, 1936, in the town of Gjirokaster in southern Albania, Kadare graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of Tirana and studied at Moscow’s Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature.
But he was recalled after Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union – the first of two major breaks with major communist powers that would later end with China.
Back in Albania, Kadare gained a reputation as a poet and novelist, but soon fell out of favor with the communist regime, which banned several of his works and briefly exiled him to the provinces.
“The Dead Army General” attracted widespread international attention when it was translated into French and published in the West. This recognition abroad has been credited with shielding Kadare from the more violent retribution that Albanian communists routinely reserve for dissidents.
After the fall of communism in Albania, Kadare resisted calls from different political parties or politicians to become the country’s president.
He is survived by his wife, Helena, also a writer, and his daughters Gresa and Besiana.
The funeral will be held on Wednesday.
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Semini reported from Bari, Italy.
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