68 Facts About Ismail Kadare

Ismail Kadare was a leading international literary figure and intellectual, focusing on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally.

Ismail Kadare was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 15 times.

Ismail Kadare was awarded the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2019, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2020.

Ismail Kadare was the husband of author Helena Kadare and the father of United Nations Ambassador and UN General Assembly Vice-president Besiana Kadare.

Ismail Kadare lived there on a crooked, narrow street known as Lunatics' Lane.

Three years after Ismail Kadare was born, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini's troops invaded Albania and ousted the king.

Ismail Kadare was nine years old when the Italian troops were withdrawn, and the communist-led People's Socialist Republic of Albania was established.

Ismail Kadare then studied Languages and Literature at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana.

Ismail Kadare lived in Tirana until moving to France in 1990.

At age 12, Ismail Kadare wrote his first short stories, which were published in the Pionieri journal in Tirana, a communist magazine for children.

At 17, Ismail Kadare won a poetry contest in Tirana, which allowed him to travel to Moscow to study at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

Ismail Kadare studied literature during the Khrushchev era, doing post-graduate work from 1958 to 1960.

Ismail Kadare's training had as its goal for him to become a communist writer and "engineer of human souls", to help construct a culture of the new Albania.

Ismail Kadare had the opportunity to read contemporary Western literature, including works by Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ernest Hemingway.

Ismail Kadare rejected the canons of Socialist Realism and committed himself internally to writing as opposed to dogmatism.

Ismail Kadare cultivated contempt for the nomenklatura, an attitude which, he later wrote, was the product of his youthful arrogance rather than of considered political opposition.

Ismail Kadare returned home in October 1960 on Albanian orders, before Albania's breaking of political and economic ties with the USSR.

Ismail Kadare lived for the next 30 years in Tirana, in an apartment which now houses the Ismail Kadare House museum and archives.

Ismail Kadare worked as a journalist, became editor-in-chief of the literary periodical Les Lettres Albanaises, and then contributed to the literary review Drita for five years, while embarking on a literary career of his own.

Ismail Kadare wrote one of his earliest pieces in the 1960s, a poem entitled "The Princess Argjiro".

In 1962, Ismail Kadare published an excerpt from his first novel as a short story under the title Coffeehouse Days in a communist youth magazine.

In 1963, at 26 years of age, Ismail Kadare published his novel The General of the Dead Army, about an army general and a priest who, 20 years after World War II, are sent to Albania to locate the remains of fallen Italian soldiers and return them to Italy for burial.

Ismail Kadare was exiled for two years along with other Albanian writers to Berat in the countryside, to learn about life alongside the peasants and workers.

Ismail Kadare continued to publish in his home country and became widely promoted there, with frequent references in the Albanian press to new releases and translations of his work, being hailed as a "hero of the new Albanian literature".

Ismail Kadare's work was described as "treat[ing] many problems preoccupying" Albanian society, and as "mak[ing] use of the revolution as the organizing element of his writing".

Ismail Kadare was lauded as having a "revolutionary drive" which "keeps pace with life and fights against old ideas".

In 1971 Ismail Kadare published the novel Chronicle in Stone, in which the narrator is a young Albanian boy whose old stone city hometown is caught up in World War II, and successively occupied by Greek, Italian, and German forces.

In 1970, Ismail Kadare published Keshtjella which was celebrated in both Albania and Western Europe, seeing a translation into French in 1972.

In 1980 Ismail Kadare published the novel Broken April, about the centuries-old tradition of hospitality, blood feuds, and revenge killing in the highlands of north Albania in the 1930s.

In 1981, Ismail Kadare published The Palace of Dreams, an anti-totalitarian fantasy novel.

Ismail Kadare first published an excerpt of the novel as a short story, alongside some of his other new works, in his 1980 collection of four novellas, Gjakftohtesia.

At a meeting of the Albanian Writers Union, Ismail Kadare was accused by the president of the Union of deliberately evading politics by cloaking much of his fiction in history and folklore, and The Palace of Dreams was expressly condemned in the presence of several members of the Albanian Politburo.

Ismail Kadare was accused of attacking the government in a covert manner, and the novel was viewed by the authorities as an anticommunist work and a mockery of the political system.

That same year Ismail Kadare finished his novel The Concert, a satirical account of the Sino-Albanian split, but it was criticized by the authorities and was not published until 1988.

Ismail Kadare initiated a process of eliminating Kadare, but backed off due to Western reaction.

In 1990 Ismail Kadare requested a meeting with Albanian president Ramiz Alia, at which he urged him to end human rights abuses, implement democratic and economic reforms, and end the isolation of Albania.

Ismail Kadare defected to Paris, where he thereafter primarily lived, except for a time in Tirana.

Ismail Kadare had decided to defect because he had become disillusioned with the government of Ramiz Alia, legal opposition was not allowed in Albania, and he had become convinced "that more than any action I could take in Albania, my defection would help the democratization of my country".

The official Albanian press agency reacted by issuing a statement on "this ugly act", saying Ismail Kadare had placed himself "in the services of the enemies of Albania".

Ismail Kadare's 1992 novel The Pyramid is a political allegory set in Egypt in the 26th century BC, focusing on intrigues behind the construction of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

In some of Ismail Kadare's novels, comprising the so-called "Ottoman Cycle", the Ottoman Empire is used as the archetype of a totalitarian state.

Ismail Kadare married Albanian author Helena Gushi and had two daughters.

Besiana Ismail Kadare is the Albanian ambassador to the United Nations, its ambassador to Cuba and a vice president of the United Nations General Assembly for its 75th session.

In 1992, Ismail Kadare was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca international literary award in France.

In 2005 Ismail Kadare received the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in the United Kingdom for the full body of his work.

In 2008 Ismail Kadare received the Flaiano Prize international award in Italy.

In 2009, Ismail Kadare was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain, for his literary works.

In 2015, Ismail Kadare was awarded the bi-annual Jerusalem Prize in Israel.

Ismail Kadare noted that Albania and Israel share in common the experience of fighting for survival in a sometimes hostile neighbourhood.

In 2016, Ismail Kadare became the first Albanian Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur recipient, with the award being given to him by French president Francois Hollande.

Ismail Kadare won the 2018 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Ismail Kadare won the 2019 Park Kyong-ni Prize, an international award based in South Korea, for his literary works during his career.

In 2023, Ismail Kadare won the America Award in Literature for a lifetime contribution to international writing.

Ismail Kadare was nominated for the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature in the United States by Bulgarian writer Kapka Kassobova.

Ismail Kadare was selected as the 2020 laureate by the Prize's jury.

Ismail Kadare won the 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Ismail Kadare won the 2020 Prozart Award, given by the PRO-ZA Balkan International Literature Festival, for his contributions to the development of literature in the Balkans.

Ismail Kadare received the President of the Republic of Albania "Honor of the Nation" Decoration, and the French state order "Cross of the Legion of Honor".

Ismail Kadare was a member of the Academy of Albania, the Berlin Academy of Arts, and the Mallarme Academy, and was awarded honorary doctorates in 1992 from the University of Grenoble III in France, in 2003 from the University of Pristina in Kosovo, and in 2009 from the University of Palermo in Italy.

Ismail Kadare was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 15 times.

Ismail Kadare stated that the press spoke about him being a potential Nobel Prize winner so much, that "many people think that I've already won it".

Ismail Kadare was considered to be one of the greatest writers in the world.

Ismail Kadare had to struggle to get his literary works published, going against state policy.

Ismail Kadare used old devices such as parable, myth, fable, folk-tale, allegory, and legend, and sprinkled them with double-entendre, allusion, insinuation, satire, and coded messages.

Ismail Kadare challenged Socialist Realism for three decades and opposed it with his subjective realism, avoiding state censorship by using allegorical, symbolic, historical and mythological means.

The conditions in which Ismail Kadare lived and published his works were not comparable to other European Communist countries where at least some level of public dissent was tolerated.

Henri Amouroux, a member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques of France, pointed out that Soviet dissidents including Solzhenitsyn published their works during the era of de-Stalinization, whereas Ismail Kadare lived and published his works in a country which remained Stalinist until 1990.

Some Ismail Kadare books were translated into English by David Bellos, from French translations rather than the Albanian originals.