Ismail Kadare was Albania’s best-known poet and novelist. Translations of his novels, which include The Siege, The Successor, Chronicle in Stone and The Accident, have been published in more than forty countries. In 2005 he became the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2024.

‘The writer is always to some extent in exile, wherever he is, because he is somehow outside, separated from others; there is always a distance.’ Ismail Kadare, The Art of Fiction No. 153, Paris Review 1998