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June 3, 2005
Ismail Kadare Wins First-Ever Intl Booker Prize
Albanian author Ismail Kadare has just won the first international Booker Prize for literature. The award is a spin-off of the Booker Prize awarded each year to British and Commonwealth writers.
"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 in an AFP wire story. "My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realise that this region, to which my country, Albania, belongs, 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."
I first became familiar with Kadare's work after reading his marvelous Chronicle in Stone, a semi-autobiographical account of a sensitive young boy living through the chaos and confusion of World War II. The book takes place in the southern Albanian town of Gjirokastra, one of the most fascinating places I've ever visited. A medieval town sloping down a steep mountainside, all the houses are built with the entrance on the second floor - that way you could retract a ladder and lock up the house in case it's seiged because of a blood feud.
Anyway, congratulations to Mr. Kadare for the well-deserved award.
Posted by acarvin at June 3, 2005 10:12 AM
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