LONDON, June 2: Albanian writer Ismail Kadare won the inaugural Man Booker International literary prize on Thursday, and said he hoped the award showed the Balkans was not just about civil war or ethnic cleansing.

Kadare, who broke with Albania’s communist government and was granted political asylum in France in 1990, fought off a distinguished list of authors from around the world to land the 60,000 pound ($115,000) prize.

American novelist John Updike, Germany’s Guenter Grass and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez were among 18 authors from 13 countries shortlisted for the prize, the new global cousin of the prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction.

In contrast to its elder relation which is confined to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, the new prize is open to all authors either writing in English or whose work has been widely translated into English.

Accepting the prize, Kadare said: “I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness — armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing and so on.”—Reuters