Ismail Kadare, Whose Novels Brought Albanias Plight to the World, Dies at 88

Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist and poet who single-handedly wrote his isolated Balkan homeland onto the map of world literature, creating often dark, allegorical works that obliquely criticized the country’s totalitarian state, died in Tirana, Albania, on Monday.He was 88.His death was confirmed by Bujar Hudhri, the head of the Onufri Publishing House, his editor and publisher in Albania, who said that he went into cardiac arrest at his home and died at a hospital in Tirana, the Albanian capital.In a literary career that spanned half a century, Mr.

Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) wrote scores of books, including novels and collections of poems, short stories and essays.He shot to international fame in 1970 when his first novel, “The General of the Dead Army,” was translated into French.

European critics hailed it as a masterpiece.Mr.Kadare’s name was floated several times for the Nobel Prize, but the honor eluded him.

In 2005, he received the inaugural Man Booker International Prize (now the International Booker Prize), awarded to a living writer of any nationality for overall achievement in fiction.The finalists included such literary titans as Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth.In awarding the prize, John Carey, a British critic and the panel’s chairman, called Mr.

Kadare “a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.”Critics often compared Mr.Kadare to Kafka, Kundera and Orwell, among others.

During the first three decades of his career, he lived and wrote in Albania, at the time under the grip of one of the eastern bloc’s most brutal and idiosyncratic dictators, Enver Hoxha.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscrib...