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albania people albania travel albania history albania investment Albanian Kadare Wins Booker International Prize Albania's Kadare Wins Booker International Prize03/06/2005 Albanian poet and novelist Ismail Kadare has won the first ever Booker International Prize. Kadare says it is proof that the Balkans are not only about war, conflict and ethnic cleansing. World opinon, he said, will now realise the region can be the source of other kinds of news. (AP, The Guardian, The Scotsman, AlbanianBulletin.com - 03/06/05; BBC, The Man Booker International Prize 2005 Web Site - 02/06/05)
Albania's best-known novelist and poet, Ismail Kadare, won the inaugural Booker International Prize 2005 on Thursday (2 June). He was chosen from among a host of prominant writers, including John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass and Muriel Spark. "Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture -- its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters," John Carey, chairman of the three-member panel of judges, said in a statement posted on the award's Web site Thursday. The idea for the international award came after criticism that the Booker Prize -- one of the most prestigious in contemporary literature -- was open only to British and Commonwealth authors. The International Booker will be awarded once every two years to a living author of fiction whose works are either published originally in English or available in translation. "I was astonished when the call came," the British daily The Guardian quoted Kadare, 69, as saying Thursday in Paris, where he sought political asylum in 1990. "The shortlist alone made up an extraordinary literary family." Kadare, whose works have been translated in more than 40 countries, is best known for his first novel, "The General of the Dead Army" (1963). Other titles translated in English include "The Three Arched Bridge", "Chronicle in Stone", "Durontine", "The File on H", "The Concert" and "The Palace of Dreams". "I feel deeply honoured by the award," Kadare said. "I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness -- armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on." He said he hopes that Europe and the world would now change their views of the region and realise that it "can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the field of the arts, literature and civilisation". Kadare will be awarded the equivalent of nearly 89,000 euros and a trophy at a ceremony in Edinburgh on 27 June. In accordance with the rules, he will choose a translator or translators to receive an additional prize of 22,000 euros. Kadare was born in 1936 in the southern town of Gjirokaster. Initially a journalist and poet, he became critical of Enver Hoxha's repressive Stalinist regimes. "The only act of resistance possible in a classic Stalinist regime was to write -- or you could go to a meeting and say something very courageous, and then be shot," The Guardian quoted Kadare as saying. "I was very lucky to be able to publish from time to time. A lot of writers were simply crushed." The fact that six of his works were banned proved counterproductive for Albania's communist regime, "because all those people who had already read them started studying them seriously to see just why they were so subversive," he also told the British daily. "So book bans actually played a big role in the emancipation of the country." |
