Ismail Kadare, the most prominent contemporary Albanian writer, died this morning at the age of 88, his publisher and hospital informed AFP.

Kadare, who resisted Enver Hoxha’s regime, suffered a heart attackaccording to the Tirana hospital.

He was taken to hospital “with no vital signs”, doctors tried to revive him but “passed out at about 06:40 GMT” (8:40 local time), the hospital said.

Kadares studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana and then at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. He introduced himself to Albanian letters immediately after his return from Moscow, with poems and the prose A city without advertisements (1959). With the publication of the novel The General of a Dead Army (1963), he established himself as one of his country’s most talented writers. He also wrote historical novels, which are an amalgam of realism and fantasy. He is considered one of the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Projects and awards

Kandare’s oeuvre exceeds 20 prose works, most of which have been translated into many languages. In Kadare’s novels, the real and the imaginary are mixed. His main subjects are modern Albanian society, his country’s former communist regime as well as harsh Albanian customary law (rule of honor or kanun in Albanian). He has also written poetry. In Greek, his novels first appeared in the 1990s, first in translation from French publications and later in direct translation from Albanian.

In the post-communist era his works often deal with the timeless European identity of Albania or the Albanians. For this purpose he often connects the Homeric epics with the Albanian tradition. He also often uses the Ottoman Empire as a model of anti-European oppressive culture, which once cut Albania off from Europe. He has however been criticized for statements such as Albania being a white nation within a white European continent.[23] He believes that Albanians, Greeks and Romans are the heart of European cultural identity.[24]

In 2005 was awarded the first Booker International Prize, while he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2009 he was also honored with the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. He was also awarded the Balkanika Award for the year 2009, for his work L’entravee.[26] In 2015 he was awarded the Jerusalem Literary Prize.