Ismail Kadare : The Writer and the Dictatorship 1957-1990

Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship 1957-1990

Ismail Kadare has experienced a life of controversy. In his own country and internationally he has been both acclaimed as a writer and condemned as a lackey of the Albanian socialist dictatorship. Coming of age after occupation and war, Kadare (b.1936) belonged to the first generation of new Albanians. In a land where writers were routinely persecuted, Kadare produced some of the most brilliant, terrifying and subversive novels to emerge from socialist Eastern Europe.

The inaugural award of the International Man-Booker Prize for Literature in 2005 marked an important milestone in the global recognition of Kadare. Ironic, multi-layered and imaginative, Kadare''s writing is profoundly opposed to ideology. Through critical analysis of a representative selection of Kadare''s works, Peter Morgan explains for a wide audience how Kadare survived and wrote in the repressive Albanian Stalinist environment.