- First winner of the Man Booker International Prize (2005).
- He emigrated to France in 1990 because of the difficult political situation in his home country, but is still considered Albania`s most important living author.
- Pictured on a 1-Euro Kosovar postage stamp issued 20 December 2016, celebrating his 80th birthday.
- As his reputation grew, he received the Légion d'Honneur. But this garland provoked a host of uncomfortable questions, with the Romanian writer Renata Dumitrascu saying that his career was "built on a dubious premise", declaring "Kadare is no Solzhenitsyn and never has been".
- Ismail Kadare was an 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.
- After studies at Tirana University, in the Albanian capital, Ismail Kadare was sent for postgraduate study to the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow, which he later described as "a factory for fabricating dogmatic hacks of the socialist-realism school.".
- He won the 2020 Prozart Award, given by the PRO-ZA Balkan International Literature Festival, for his contributions to the development of literature in the Balkans.
- The London newspaper The Independent said of Kadare: "He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal but deeply rooted in his own soil.".
- To protect his work from manipulation in the event of his death, Kadare smuggled manuscripts out of Albania in 1986, delivering them to his French publisher, Claude Durand. The publisher in turn used his own trips to Tirana to smuggle out additional writings.
- In 2023, he won the America Award in Literature for a lifetime contribution to international writing.
- Kadare's works have been published in 45 languages.
- Kadare received the President of the Republic of Albania "Honor of the Nation" Decoration, and the French state order "Cross of the Legion of Honor".
- In 1975, after Kadare wrote "The Red Pashas," a poem criticizing members of the Politburo, he was banished to a remote village and barred from publishing for a time. His response came in 1981, when he published "The Palace of Dreams," a damning critique of the regime.
- Some of his works have been translated into English by David Bellos, though not from the Albanian original, but rather from French translations.
- Writing in 1997 in The New York Review of Books, Noel Malcolm, an Oxford historian, praised the "atmospheric density" and "poetic tautness" of Mr. Kadare's writing, but chastised his defensiveness with critics. In a thin-skinned response, Mr. Kadare accused Mr. Malcolm of exhibiting cultural arrogance against an author from a small country.
- In 1970, when "The General of the Dead Army" was published in a French translation, it took "literary Paris by storm," The Paris Review wrote. Kadare's sudden prominence drew the surveillance of the dictator himself. To placate the regime, he wrote "The Great Winter" (1977), a novel celebrating Hoxha's break with the Soviet Union in 1961.
- In 1965, the authorities banned his second novel, "The Monster," immediately after its publication in a magazine.
- Writing under the shadow of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, Kadare examined contemporary society through the lens of allegory and myth in novels including The General of the Dead Army, The Siege and The Palace of Dreams.
- Kadare's name was floated several times for the Nobel Prize, but the honor eluded him.
- To escape persecution in a country where more than 6,000 dissidents were executed and some 168,000 Albanians were sent to prison or labor camps, Kadare walked a political tightrope. He served for 12 years as a deputy in Albania's People's Assembly, and was a member of the regime's Writers Union.
- In 1990 Kadare requested a meeting with Albanian president Ramiz Alia, at which he urged him to end human rights abuses, implement democratic and economic reforms, and end the isolation of Albania. Kadare was disappointed with Alia's slow reaction.
- Since the 1990s, Kadare was asked multiple times by both the country's major political parties to run for president of Albania, but he declined.
- Citing a list of 100 intellectuals targeted for arrest by the Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi, Kadare fled to Paris and claimed political asylum in France.
- After studying at Tirana University, he won a government scholarship to study literature at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. He returned to Tirana in 1960 with a novel about two students reinventing a lost Albanian text. When he published an extract in a magazine, it was promptly banned.
- His Tirana apartment was converted into a museum in 2019, showcasing the work and life of the author.
- He won the 2019 Park Kyong-ni Prize, an international award based in South Korea, for his literary works during his career.
- He was the father of United Nations Ambassador and UN General Assembly Vice-President Besiana Kadare.
- In 1961 he published a volume of poetry entitled Shekulli im (My Century). His work was particularly popular with Albanian youth. His future wife Helena, then a schoolgirl, wrote a fan letter to the young writer, which eventually led to their marriage in 1963.
- The New York Times wrote that he was a national figure in Albania comparable in popularity perhaps to Mark Twain in the United States, and that "there is hardly an Albanian household without a Kadare book".
- Though he was born into a Muslim family, Kadare himself was an atheist.
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