Ismail Kadare Wins Innaugural Man Booker
Noted Albanian poet and novelist Ismail Kadare has won the first-ever Man Booker International Prize, thus gaining recognition as one of the world's finest writers.
"Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture -- its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters," critic John Carey, who led a three-member panel of judges, said. "He is a universal writer in a tradition of story-telling that goes back to Homer." Kadare will receive a prize of 60,000 pounds plus a trophy in a ceremony at Edinburgh on June 27, with an extra 15,000 pounds for a translator of his choice. According to a statement, Kadare, who fled to France in 1990 as a refugee before the collapse of dictator Enver Hoxha's Communist regime, said: 'I feel deeply honoured. 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.' Eighteen other authors were shortlisted for the honour, including the late Saul Bellow, Germany's Gunter Grass, Czech-born Milan Kundera, Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz, US writers Philip Roth and John Updike and Canada's Margaret Atwood. |
Printable version
Back to top
