AN ALBANIAN dissident novelist and poet, whose books were banned under Communism, beat four Nobel prizewinners yesterday to win the first international Man Booker prize for fiction.

Ismail Kadaré, 69, who has lived in France since the 1990s and who has often been a Nobel contender, was singled out for the £60,000 award, expected to become one of the most eminent in literature.

He is regarded as one of Europe’s finest writers and has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. The General of the Dead Army, the story of an Italian general who goes to Albania after the Second World War to recover the bodies of Italian soldiers, is regarded as one of his best books.

Nobel laureates from Colombia, Germany, Egypt and Japan — Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Naguib Mahfouz and Kenzaburo Oe — were among 18 authors from 13 countries who had been shortlisted.

The Man Booker International Prize will be awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction in English or whose work is available in translation in English.

It can be presented to an author of any nationality and differs from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it recognises a body of work rather than a single volume.

John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, the judges’ chairman, said: “Kadaré is a writer who maps a whole culture — its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer.”

On hearing the news, Kadaré 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 . . .

“My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realise that this region, to which my country, Albania, belongs, can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the field of the arts, literature and civilisation.”

Born in the Albanian mountain town of Gjirokastër, he was still a boy when the Communists seized power at the end of the Second World War.He became an acute satirist of his nation under Communist rule, making little effort to conceal his hope that ancient Albanian ways and beliefs would reassert themselves. From 1986 his work was smuggled out of Albania by his French publisher, Éditions Fayard.

He left Albania in 1990 and was welcomed in France as an “honoured guest”. On his decision to seek asylum, he said: “Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible . . . The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”

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