TIRANA, June 1, 2024 – Albania’s greatest writer and perennial Nobel Prize candidate, Ismail Kadare, has died at the age of 88.
Kadare had permanently moved back to his homeland of Albania from France in recent years and died of a heart attack Monday morning, doctors at Tirana’s largest public hospital said.
Globally renowned and widely translated through his epic works, “Broken April” and “The General of the Dead Army,” Kadare used metaphor and quiet sarcasm to chronicle the grotesque fate of his country and its people under the paranoid communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha.
He was also a master of magic realism using history to speak to the future through works like “Chronicle in Stone” and “The Ghost Rider.”
In addition to his novels, he will be remembered for his poetry and essays, dedicating much of his late years to the latter.
Kadare is also widely seen as one of the greatest writers and intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries and as a universal voice against totalitarianism.
Kadare received numerous international prizes over his lifetime, including the International Booker Prize in 2005 and the 2023 America’s Prize for Literature, recognizing his profound contributions to global literary heritage.
He was also nominated 15 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
-Contribution to ‘making Albania’-
Kadare’s work had a great impact on the country of his birth, making an irreplaceable and incomparable vital contribution to the progress, modernization and development of Albania, according to Albert Rakipi, Chairman of the Albanian Institute for International Studies.
That could be his most important legacy: “between his work and his genius, Kadare is one of the biggest contributors to making Albania — a long historical process. Independence was a step forward, but the process of becoming Albania, continued and continues even now,” Rakipi said.
Kadare “contributed to the making of the modern Albania, fighting for freedom under the dictatorship and his legacy and work will continue to contribute to the making of Albania, regardless of his passing,” Rakipi added.
-Kadare’s life-
Born in Gjirokastra in southern Albania in 1936 during the Albanian Kingdom, he started writing early, publishing his first stories at 12.
He won a competition to be schooled in the Soviet Union, as did many of the top Albanian youngsters of the time, but he quickly broke away from the constraints of communist realism.
He returned to Albania in 1960 when the country broke off relations with Moscow, and worked in Tirana for 30 years, producing his most important works
Branded a traitor by Albania’s communist leaders after he sought asylum in France in 1990, Kadare was accused by some of enjoying a privileged position under Hoxha, who cut the Balkan country off from the rest of the world.
It was an accusation he dismissed with irony in his last major interview for the AFP in 2016.
“Against whom was Enver Hoxha protecting me? Against Enver Hoxha?” Kadare said. “The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term … But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship. Which is why I am so grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible.”
Messages of condolences have poured in. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama honored Kadare as a “monument of Albanian culture.”
In October 2023, during his visit to Tirana, French President Emmanuel Macron awarded Kadare the title of Senior Officer of the Legion of Honor, one of France’s most important medals, noting that Kadare, “contributed to the great awakening of the people under the Iron Curtain.”
Kadare is survived by his wife Elena Kadare and their two daughters.
