Ismail Kadare Nobel Prize Death: Ismail Kadare died on Monday from an apparent heart attack at age 88. According to his editor and a Tirana hospital, ”Doctors tried to revive the writer when he was brought to a Tirana hospital with “no signs of life” and he was declared dead at 8:40 am local time, the hospital said.
Who Was Ismail Kadare?
Ismail Kadare was an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. Ismail was a leading international literary figure and intellectual, who focused on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally. Ismail was married to Albanian author Helena Gushi, and has two daughters. His daughter Besiana Kadare is the Albanian Ambassador to the United Nations, Albania’s Ambassador to Cuba, and a Vice President of the United Nations General Assembly for its 75th session.
In 1992, Ismail was awarded the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca; in 1998, the Herder Prize; in 2005, the inaugural Man Booker International Prize; in 2009, the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts; and in 2015, the Jerusalem Prize. He was awarded the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2019, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2020.[2] In 1996, France made him a foreign associate of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and in 2016, he was a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur recipient. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 15 times. From the 1990s Kadare was asked by both major political parties in Albania to become a consensual President of the country, but declined.
The prolific writer broke ranks with isolated Albania’s communists and fled to Paris a few months before the government collapsed in the early 1990s. In his book The Albanian Spring – The Anatomy of Tyranny, he wrote about his disillusionment.
Where was Ismail Kadare born?
Ismail was born in the Kingdom of Albania during the reign of King Zog I. He was born in Gjirokastër, a historic Ottoman Empire fortress mountain city of tall stone houses in southern Albania, a dozen miles from the border with Greece. He lived on a crooked, narrow street called “Lunatics’ Lane”. At age 11, Kadare read William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. He recalled years later: “Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play.”
How many Nobel Prize nominations did Ismail Kadare get?
Kadare has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 15 times. He has stated that the press has spoken about him being a potential Nobel Prize winner so much, that “many people think that I’ve already won it”. Ismail was often tipped to win a Nobel prize for his towering body of work which delved into his country’s myths and history to dissect the mechanisms of totalitarianism. Kadare’s novels, essays, and poems have been translated into more than 40 languages, making him the Balkans’ best-known modern novelist.
His nominating juror for the Neustadt Prize wrote: “Kadare is the successor of Franz Kafka. No one since Kafka has delved into the infernal mechanism of totalitarian power and its impact on the human soul in as much hypnotic depth as Kadare.” His writing has also been compared to that of Nikolai Gogol, George Orwell, Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Balzac. Living in Albania during a time of strict censorship, Kadare devised cunning stratagems to outwit Communist censors who had banned three of his books, using devices such as parable, myth, fable, folk-tale, allegory, and legend, sprinkled with double-entendre, allusion, insinuation, satire, and coded messages. In 1990, to escape the Communist regime and its Sigurimi secret police, he defected to Paris. His works have been published in 45 languages. The New York Times wrote that he was a national figure in Albania comparable in popularity perhaps to Mark Twain in the United States, and that “there is hardly an Albanian household without a Kadare book.”
