Inspiration bubbles over for winning wordsmith

Published on Tuesday 28 June 2005 01:51

THE Albanian dissident writer Ismail Kadare yesterday collected the first Man Booker International Prize for Literature and told how the biggest influence on his writing was Macbeth.

Mr Kadare picked up the 60,000 award in Edinburgh last night for writing that mixes the traditional blood feuds of the Balkans with the struggles of a country under Communist dictatorship.

He was setting out today for a "Macbeth tour" to Dunsinane and Glamis Castle, a place which he said "fired his passion for literature". Mr Kadare told how he grew up in a small medieval city with a castle, used by the Communist regime as a prison, a building that radiated "power and menace".

"When I was 11 or 12, however, in the season of our first serious encounters with reading, another castle took over my mind and my imagination. It was a Scottish castle, located not so far from here: the castle of Macbeth.

"A strange thing had come to pass. A teenager from the back end of a tiny country crushed under the heel of Communism - Albania - had been propelled, by the force of Shakespeare, so to speak, towards the inaccessible shores of misty Scotland."

Mr Kadare, 69, won the award this month over a shortlist that included some of the world's best-known names in fiction - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gnter Grass, Doris Lessing and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie author, Muriel Spark.

The new prize recognises an author's body of work, rather than a single book. It was presented in a ceremony at Edinburgh's Royal Museum yesterday, in recognition of the city's new title as UNESCO City of Literature.

Judges sifted through 120 writers from 36 countries before selecting Mr Kadare. The chairman of the prize judges, Professor John Carey, described Mr Kadare as a "master storyteller" with "first-hand experience of the 20th century's darker side", who had lived through the kind of political turmoil that few English or American writers had experienced.

Mr Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokaster in southern Albania. The country was overrun by Italian and Nazi forces during the Second World War before being subjected to a "dictatorship of the most savage kind", said Prof Carey.

Mr Kadare told guests at the museum of how he was one of a small group of writers who "kept the faith" under Stalinism. "We helped each other as we tried to write literature as if that regime did not exist. At times we pulled it off, at others we did not."

Mr Kadare's work had to be smuggled out of the country before he won political asylum in France in 1990. He has sold 250,000 copies of his books in his native Albania, is well-known in France and is published in 40 countries.

He made his name with his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, written in 1963, about an Italian general who comes to Albania to reclaim the bones of his dead soldiers.

A newly translated novel, The Successor, will be published by Edinburgh-based Canongate next year. It begins with the night-time shooting of the Successor, the man chosen to be the future head of a ruthless dictatorship.

Mr Kadare's books until recently sold only a few hundred copies a year in Britain - with Mr Carey admitting that he had not read one of them until last October. It is hoped the new prize, with the Booker name, will lead to greater exposure in the United States and Britain.

Mr Kadare said yesterday: "When I saw the list of my competitors, I thought it would be impossible to get such a prize.

"It was an outstanding group and probably everyone on the list thought it was impossible to win. Several of them already had the Nobel Prize."

David Bellos, who has translated Mr Kadare's works into English for the past ten years, received a 15,000 prize for his work. Mr Bellos, a professor of French in the United States who taught at the University of Edinburgh, said the influence of Macbeth on Mr Kadare's writing was clearest in his book Broken April.