TIRANA, May 31 – Kosovo writer Musa Ramadani has been announced the winner of this year’s Kadare award named after Albania’s internationally renowned writer Ismail Kadare, a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ramadani, a 73 year-old Kosovo-based writer, was awarded the prize worth Euro 10,000, for his unpublished “Profeti nga Praga” (Prophet from Prague) novel elaborating on the artist’s fate in general and more specifically on Franz Kafka.
The prize was awarded by a jury headed by Bashkim Shehu, the Spain-based Albanian writer who was imprisoned in the 1980s under communism following the death of his father Mehmet Shehu, a long-serving Prime Minister accused of being a “polyagent” of foreign secret services by late dictator Enver Hoxha.
“With his ‘Prophet from Prague’ Musa Ramadani has brought a special novel both in style and content. Being structured with strongly related short stories, the Prophet from Prague comes up as a mosaic of confessions and collage of narrative techniques, a novel on literature as a text of pleasure and act of eternity where the writer is unfolded as an open book to different contexts and connotations,” read the motivation of the award handed to the writer by former French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand.
Ramadani was one of the six shortlisted artists for the third edition of the Kadare award which had 36 manuscripts by Albanian-speaking authors competing.
The tight vote in favour of the Kosovo writer, not much known in Albania, triggered debate with the Albanian contestant Viron Graà§i, calling into question whether this year’s winning book will also be a failure in bookshops and Albanian and Kosovo literary and culture circles like the previous two winners.
Albania’s Rudolf Marku and Shkelqim à‡ela were the previous two winners of the Kadare award promoted by the Mapo Foundation.
An internationally renowned poet, novelist and essayist, Ismail Kadare has been perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. International acclaim for his works peaked in 2005 when he won the Man Booker International Prize.
Known for writing about Albania’s totalitarian government, Kadare has had his works translated more than 40 languages, the most famous of which is “The General of the Dead Army.”
