TIRANA, Albania (AP) — Albanian novelist and poet Ismail KadareA writer whose blasphemous works in Communist Albania brought him international fame and persecution by the country’s dictatorial regime has died in Tirana, his publication editor said on Monday. He was 88.
Kadare wins Numerous international awardsHe has long been mentioned as a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Albanian President Bajram Begaj hailed Kadare as the country’s “spiritual liberator.”
“Albania and the Albanian people have lost a literary genius… The Balkans have lost a mythical poet and Europe and the world have lost one of the most outstanding representatives of modern literature,” Begaj said in a statement released by his office.
The Albanian government has declared two days of national mourning on Tuesday and Wednesday, with flags flying at half-mast. A minute’s silence will be held across the country on Wednesday after Kadare’s funeral.
Bujar Khudli, editor at Onufli Publishing House, said the author died on Monday morning after being rushed to hospital.
A nurse at the hospital said he went into cardiac arrest and was taken to the emergency room, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media.
Kadare gained international recognition with his 1963 novel The General of the Dead Army, which was later adapted into a film starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimé. The book tells the story of an Italian general sent to Albania to locate and repatriate the bones of thousands of Italians killed there during World War II, and his reflections on the futility of the mission and the war.
At the time, Albania was still ruled by the communist government of the late dictator Enver Hoxha, making the small, mountainous Balkan nation one of the most isolated in Europe.
Kadare, who gained a reputation for his sensitive fiction writing, fled to France in the autumn of 1990, just months before the December student uprising toppled the Communist regime. He lived in Paris and had recently returned to Tirana, the Albanian capital.
During his visit to Albania last year, French President Emmanuel Macron Grand Officer of the Legion of HonorFrance had previously appointed him a foreign member of the Academie des Morals and Political Sciences and a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Kadare has received numerous international awards, including the inaugural International Booker Prize in 2005. His work includes more than 80 novels, plays, screenplays, poems, essays and short story collections, and has been translated into 45 languages.
Born on January 28, 1936 in the southern Albanian city of Gjirokastra, Kadare graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology at the University of Tirana and then studied at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow.
But he was recalled after Khodja broke with the Soviet Union, the first of two major breaks with major Communist countries that would later lead to the break with China.
Upon his return to Albania, Kadare achieved fame as a poet and novelist, but he soon came under attack from the Communist regime, who banned some of his works and briefly exiled him to the countryside.
When The General of the Dead Army was translated into French and published in the West, it attracted considerable international attention, and this recognition abroad is credited with protecting Kadare from the more violent reprisals that were routinely meted out to dissidents by Albanian Communists.
After the collapse of communism in Albania, Kadare resisted calls from various parties and politicians to become president.
He is survived by his wife, Helena, also a writer, and his daughters Gretha and Veciana.
The funeral will take place on Wednesday.
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Semini reported from Bari, Italy.