Two Albanian writers featured in French magazine’s launch issue

TIRANA, May 16 – Ismail Kadare and Ylljet Alicka, two Albanian writers known for their connections with France, were featured in the launch issue of NOOR, France’s first philosophical magazine. Internationally renowned writer Kadare, a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, who has been sharing his life between France and Albania just before the collapse of the communist regime in the late 1980s, was featured into the semi-annual magazine with an interview, praising Albania’s religious tolerance and its importance on the existence of the country. “Albania wouldn’t have existed if we didn’t have tolerance between Muslims and Christians. It was our difficult life which made us understand logic and the need for tolerance,” Kadare was quoted as saying.
Ylljet Alicka, a writer and former Albanian Ambassador to France was also featured with a tale.
The semi-annual Noor magazine was successfully launched this spring as an idea of a group of well-known philosophers such as Malek Chebel, Mark Ferro with the goal of “urging debate and reflections on spiritualism and secularism, rising racism and radicalism, signaling a world which is dying of fear and fed more and more by the absolutism of thought and the loss of collective passions.”