TIRANA: Albanians mourned Ismail Kadare, their “greatest cultural monument”, on Monday after the acclaimed novelist — tipped several times for the Nobel literature prize — died of a heart attack at a Tirana hospital aged 88.

Prime Minister Edi Rama led the tributes with the president of neighbouring Kosovo Vjosa Osmani hailing Kadare’s “remarkable contribution to Albanian and world literature”.

Through the epic sweep of novels like “Broken April” and “The General of the Dead Army”, the writer used metaphor and quiet sarcasm to chronicle the grotesque fate of his country and its people under the paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Despite being branded a traitor by Albania’s communist leaders when he defected to France in 1990, Kadare was accused by some of enjoying a privileged position under Hoxha, who cut the Balkan country off from the rest of the world. It was an accusation he dismissed with withering irony. “Against whom was Enver Hoxha protecting me? Against Enver Hoxha?” Kadare said in 2016.

Rama referenced that debate in his tribute on Facebook, thanking the novelist for the “extraordinary pleasure” of the worlds, characters and emotions “he conjured up with the ease of a magician”. He said he also took pleasure in the jealousy Kadare’s success stirred in the “mediocres” who criticised him.

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti said “Kadare was the gleam of creativity, of humanity and of individual genius... in the darkness of dictatorship.

“He found ways to illuminate, to question and to laugh” even “within the harshest political and artistic restrictions”, he added on X.

While Kadare was the eternal Nobel bridesmaid, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his life’s work, with judges saying his storytelling “goes back to Homer”.

British novelist and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare said Kadare “should have been given the Nobel”, with former prime minister Tony Blair’s ex-right-hand man Alastair Campbell also taking to X to hail “such a great writer”.

Albanian writer Lea Ypi, author of the award-winning memoir “Free”, posted that he was an “all-time magician of words “: “The first verses I learned to recite were from you.” Translated into more than 40 languages, the prolific Kadare put Albanian literature on the map internationally from the 1970s.

“He reshaped both Albanian letters and society thanks to works published during those dark times (of dictatorship) and afterwards,” said Persida Asllani, head of literature at the University of Tirana. “He may have left this world” but his work would go on influencing people, she said.

In one of his last interviews in October, he said his writing helped him subvert the repression he suffered. “The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term,” he said.

“But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship.

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2024