Universal writer bags new prize
2005-06-03 09:44
London - Albanian author Ismail Kadare on Thursday won the first Man Booker International Prize, beating out such well-known authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Milan Kundera and Philip Roth.
The judges cited "storytelling that goes back to Homer" in recognising Kadare with the £60 000 award.
"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," Kadare said.
"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."
He added that the prize confirmed "my confidence and my hopes have not been misplaced".
Among Kadare's best-known novels is his first, The General of the Dead Army, published in 1963. It tells the story of an Italian general on a mission in Albania to repatriate the remains of Italian soldiers who died there during World War II.
The novels that followed dealt with Albania's history and culture and how the past continues to affect the present as the works of the poet-turned-novelist were hailed for their lyricism.
To be awarded every two years
His other titles include 1978's Broken April, 1981's The Palace of Dreams and 1988's The Concert.
"Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture - its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters," said the chairman of the Booker judges panel, Professor John Carey.
"He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer."
Kadare was born in 1936 in the mountain town of Gjirokaster near the Greek border. In 1990, two months before the collapse of the communist dictatorship in Albania, he left his home country to seek political asylum in France, where he still lives today.
The international Booker Prize, which is to be awarded every two years, was created to celebrate a living novelist who has contributed significantly to the world of literature. The writer must have either originally published in English or his work must be generally available in English translation.
Kadare's writing has been published in more than 40 countries.
He will receive the prize on June 27 in Edinburgh and will also be able to select a translator to receive an additional prize of £15 000.
Eighteen authors from 13 countries were on the list of contenders for the first international Booker.
Besides Kadare, Garcia Marquez, Mahfouz, Kundera and Roth, they were Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Guenter Grass, Stanislaw Lem, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Tomas Eloy Martinez, Kenzaburo Oe, Cynthia Ozick, Muriel Spark, Antonio Tabucchi, John Updike and AB Yehoshua. - Sapa-dpa
- SAPA