23 December 2008 | Albania’s best known novelist, Ismail Kadare, was suggested as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature by the country’s literary circles.

Albania’s President, Bamir Topi, national and international media reported recently, wrote a letter to the Nobel Academy, appealing for Kadare’s nomination after discussions with the Albanian Academy of Sciences, intellectual circles, publishers, literary critics and prominent figures of Albanian art and culture.

As reasoning behind his support, Topi’s letter cited Kadare’s work which is “monumental in its artistic value and bears and conveys humanist and universal messages to the whole mankind,” according to media reports. “Albanians suffered one of the wildest dictatorships mankind has come to know in the twentieth century, where total isolation was its distinctive characteristic. In this closed system, the big writer Ismail Kadare wrote a literature of European spirit, free and emancipating for the Albanian art and culture when this was the most difficult thing in a bunkerified communist state,” the letter continued.

Kadare’s name has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature for the last several years.

Albania’s most renowned author was born in the city of Gjirokastër in the southern part of the country and immigrated to France in 1990. Opinions differ on whether he was a dissident or a supporter of Albania’s communist government, which he had previously written about positively.

Kadare authored over a dozen novels, including Chronicle in Stone, set in his city of birth, and The Siege, written under Enver Hoxha's dictatorship, in which he used allegories of the distant past as a way to address and discuss the present more safely.

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