Albanian writer who used metaphor to shine light on tyrannyÂ
One of the greatest writers of the late 20th century, Ismail Kadare was often tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. That honour eluded him, said The New York Times, but in 2005, he was the inaugural winner of the Man Booker International Prize for his life's work. The other finalists included Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez. Most of his books were set in his native Albania, or a disguised version of it, where for the first 30 years of his career he lived and worked under the regime of that "brutal and idiosyncratic dictator Enver Hoxha". To avoid persecution in a country in which thousands of dissidents were executed or sent to labour camps, he trod a delicate line. He served in the puppet parliament, and to curry favour with the regime, he once wrote a book in praise of Hoxha. But many of his novels "subversively attacked the dictatorship, skirting censorship through allegory, satire, myth and legend", and won him comparisons with Franz Kafka and George Orwell.Â
The son of a civil servant, he grew up in the city of Gjirokastër, close to the Greek border, on a narrow street called Lunatics' Lane. He was eight when the Communists seized power in 1944, by which time he was already immersing himself in books. "At the age of 11 I had read 'Macbeth', which had hit me like lightning," he recalled. After studying at the University of Tirana, he was sent to the Gorky Institute in Moscow. However, his studies there were cut short when Hoxha fell out with Nikita Khrushchev, considering him insufficiently hardline, and broke off relations with the USSR.Â
In 1970, "The General of the Dead Army" was translated into French, to enormous acclaim, and other foreign editions soon followed. This made the secret police yet more suspicious of him, and for two years he was banished to a remote village, to learn about the lives of workers and peasants. In 1977, he wrote "The Great Winter", which lauded the regime, in an apparent effort to save his skin. Four years later, however, he produced "The Palace of Dreams", regarded by many as his masterpiece. Set in Albania during Ottoman Turk rule, it is about a vast bureaucracy dedicated to sifting through people's dreams in search of dissident thought. His reputation abroad seems to have protected him. Nevertheless, even after Hoxha's death in 1985, he continued to live in fear of denunciation and reprisal – and in 1990, he defected to Paris. Later, he was accused of having been a collaborator. His retort, in memoirs and interviews, was that he'd resisted through his writing. "Every time I wrote a book," he said, "I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship."Â