The famous Albanian writer Ismail Kadare has died

Albanian writer Ismail Kadare died this morning at the age of 89, his publisher and hospital announced today.

Kadare died of a heart attack, the hospital in Tirana said. The writer was admitted to the hospital without any signs of life and doctors tried to resuscitate him, but he died at 8:40 a.m. local time.

Publisher Bujar Hudari, the editor of his publishing house Onufri, confirmed that the writer died this morning.

Kadare became internationally known after the publication of The General of the Dead Army in 1963, when Albania was still ruled by the communist government of the late dictator Enver Hoxha.

He fled Albania for France in 1990, just months before the fall of the communist regime following student protests in December of the previous year. He lived in Paris and recently returned to Tirana.

Kadare, a sarcastic ethnographer, an author who oscillates between the grotesque and the epic, has researched the myths and history of his country to analyse the mechanisms of the universal evil, totalitarianism, writes Agence France-Presse, recalling that Albania lived for decades under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, one of the most isolated dictatorships in the world.

“The communist hell is like any other hell, suffocating,” the writer said in one of his last interviews in October.

“But in literature it becomes a life force, a force that helps one to survive, to defeat the dictatorship with one’s head held high,” he said at the time.

“Literature has given me everything I have today. It was the meaning of my life. It gave me the courage to resist, the happiness and the hope to overcome everything,” said the already weakened Kadare in a conversation in his house in Tirana, the capital of Albania.

Kadare has won numerous international awards for his works, which include more than 80 novels, plays, screenplays, poems and essays, and his works have been translated into 45 languages. He has been mentioned several times as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He is the author of the novels “Broken April”, “Chronicle in Stone”, “The Castle”, “General of the Dead Army” and many other works and has been one of the most popular figures in Albanian literature for more than 60 years.

( BETA )