Ismail Kadare - Biography

Biography

Ismail Kadare was born on 28 January 1936 in Gjirokastër, Albania in a non-religious family. His father worked in the civil service. He attended primary and secondary schools in Gjirokastër and he studied languages and literature at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana. In 1956 Kadare received a teacher's diploma. He also studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.

Kadare served as a member of the Albanian parliament during Communist rule from 1970 until 1982 and was permitted to travel and publish abroad.

After offending the authorities with a politically satirical poem in 1975, he was forbidden to publish for three years. In 1982 Kadare was accused by the president of the League of Albanian Writers and Artists of deliberately evading politics by cloaking much of his fiction in history and folklore

In 1990, Kadare claimed political asylum in France, issuing statements in favour of democratisation. At that time, he stated that "dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship."

Critical opinion is divided as to whether Kadare should be considered to have been a dissident or a conformist during the Communist period. For his part, Kadare has stated that he had never claimed to be an "Albanian Solzhenitsyn" or a dissident, and that "dissidence was a position no one could occupy, even for a few days, without facing the firing squad. On the other hand, my books themselves constitute a very obvious form of resistance." Referring to The Great Winter (1977), a novel in which he portrayed Enver Hoxha in a flattering light, Kadare said the book was "the price he had to pay for his freedom".

He is married to Helena Kadare (née Gushi) and has two daughters.