The Albanian author Ismail Kadare is dead, reports his editor for the news agency AFP.
He was 88 years old.
Ismail Kadare died on Monday of a heart attack. He was taken to a hospital in Albania's capital Tirana, but his life could not be saved.
Kadare was born in 1936 in Albanian Gjirokastër and grew up during World War II.
After completing his teaching degree in 1956, Kadare moved to Moscow to study literature at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. In connection with Albania's distancing from the Soviet Union, he returned to his home country in 1960 and soon became one of the country's leading cultural personalities.
In order to be able to criticize his home country's socialist regime, he wrote allegorically, the Albanian break with the Soviet Union being depicted, for example, through broken engagements in novels such as "The Hard Winter" and "The Twilight of the Steppe Gods".
Despite the regime's censorship attempts, Kadare also managed to reach out internationally, including with the novel "The General of the Dead Army", which was filmed starring Marcello Mastroianni.
Kadare remained a socialist, which did not prevent the country's then dictator, Enver Hoxha, from trying to control him. For three years in the 1970s, the publication of Ismail Kadare's books was banned in Albania.
In 1991, Kadare finally sought asylum in France and also settled scores with Hoxha in the book "Le successeur".
Ismail Kadare was often mentioned in speculations about the Nobel Prize in Literature, a prize he never received.
