Ismail Kadare
"The Man Booker International Prize seeks to recognise a living author who has contributed significantly to world literature and to highlight the author's continuing creativity and development on a global scale." -- from the Man Booker International Prize website
The first Man Booker International Prize has been awarded to Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare. Other nominees included John Updike, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Gunther Grass, Muriel Spark, Philip Roth and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Kadare's first novel, The General of the Dead Army, was published in 1963. He's living in political exile in Paris.
"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." -- from Ismail Kadare's acceptance speech
Some books by Ismail Kadare (all have been translated into English):
The General of the Dead Army (1963)
The Wedding (1968)
The Castle (1970)
Chronicle in Stone (1971)
The Three-Arched Bridge (1978)
Broken April (1978)
On the Lay of the Knights (1979)
The Autobiography of the People in Verse (1980)
Doruntine (1980)
The Palace of Dreams (1981)
The Concert (1988)
Albanian Spring (1991)
The Pyramid (1997)
Elegy for Kosovo : Stories (2000)
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2002)
The File on H (2002)
Websites
Man Booker International Prize press release
http://www.manbookerinternational.com/media/20050602.php
"The Guardian" article
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1498411,00.html
Albanian Writers in Translation
http://www.albanianliterature.com/html.authors/kadare-i.html