Biography

First winner of the Man Booker International Prize (2005).

He emigrated to France in 1990 because of the difficult political situation in his home country, but is still considered Albania`s most important living author.

Pictured on a 1-Euro Kosovar postage stamp issued 20 December 2016, celebrating his 80th birthday.

As his reputation grew, he received the Légion d'Honneur. But this garland provoked a host of uncomfortable questions, with the Romanian writer Renata Dumitrascu saying that his career was "built on a dubious premise", declaring "Kadare is no Solzhenitsyn and never has been".

Ismail Kadare was an Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly wrote his isolated Balkan homeland onto the map of world literature, creating often dark, allegorical works that obliquely criticized the country's totalitarian state.