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Ismail Kadare, 2006. (credit: Frank Rumpenhorst — dpa/Corbis)

(born Jan. 28, 1936, Gjirokastër, Alb.) Albanian novelist and poet. The son of a post-office worker, Kadare became a journalist. Feeling threatened by the government in Albania, which he alternately praised and criticized, he moved to France in 1990. His best-known novel is The General of the Dead Army (1963), about post-World War II Albania, which gained him an international audience. The stories in Three Elegies for Kosovo (1999) concern the 14th-century Battle of Kosovo. Later novels include Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2000) and The Successor (2003). In 2005 Kadare won the Man Booker International Prize.

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