Thousands of Albanians have gathered in Tirana to pay tribute to their country’s best-known novelist, Ismail Kadare, who died on Monday after a heart attack.
Flags flew at half-mast as the 88-year-old writer and poet’s coffin lay in state in the entrance hall of the Opera and Ballet theatre in Skanderbeg Square, surrounded by National Guard officers.
Some mourners read out Kadare’s poems, while others applauded and threw flowers as the writer’s coffin was carried to a hearse for a private funeral in the city.
Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, said in a speech that Kadare, who was nominated 15 times for the Nobel literature prize but never won, had put his country’s literature “into the pantheon of world letters”.
Rama said the writer, whose best-known works include The General of the Dead Army and The Palace of Dreams, “came into this world, wrote and left”. He added that it was right for Kadare to be given a private funeral, because “he was not a martyr and it was not in his desire to be a martyr”.
In spite of missing out on the Nobel, Kadare received numerous awards in his lifetime, including the Man Booker international prize in 2005, the Prince of Asturias prize for the arts in 2009, and the America award in literature in 2023. In France, where he sought political asylum in the 1990s, President Emmanuel Macron last year awarded him the title of grand officer of the legion of honour.
Kadare “received all the possible praises and honours of the world”, Rama said, “and all possible … insults from the country that gave birth to him”.
Under the Communist regime of its prime minister Enver Hoxha, some of Kadare’s poems and novels were banned for appearing to criticise the ruling party’s authoritarian paranoia, and the writer was forced to attend self-criticism sessions. In 1975, he was sent to do manual labour in a remote village after publishing a satirical poem that took aim at Albania’s state bureaucracy.
But the writer rejected being labelled as a “dissident”, saying that open opposition to a dictatorial regime had been impossible. Although not a party member, Kadare was at one point chairman of a cultural institute run by Hoxha’s wife.
Two days of mourning were declared in Albania. Neighbouring Kosovo, which has a predominantly ethnic Albanian population, also declared Wednesday a day of mourning. Officials from neighbouring North Macedonia, which has a sizeable ethnic Albanian minority, attended the funeral ceremony in Tirana.
“He was not just a writer. He represented the feelings of all Albanians of all time in history,” said Angjelina Xhara, a film-maker who worked with Kadare.
Kadare was born in the town of Gjirokastër in 1936. He is survived by his wife, the author Helena Kadare, and their two daughters.
Reuters contributed to this report.