Elegy for Kosovo

ismail kadare peter constantine

Inspired by the brutal ethnic cleansing that took place in 1997 and 1998 in Kosovo, this collection of three stories explores the historical backdrop and implications of the killings for the people involved in both sides of the conflict.

Genres fictionhistorical fictionshort storiesliteraturealbanian literaturewarnovellahistoricalmilitary fictionmedieval

121 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1998

Places

kosovo,

This edition

Format: 121 pages, Hardcover
Published: January 1, 2000 by Arcade Pub
ISBN: 9781559705288
ASIN: 1559705280
Language: English

Characters More characters

Slobodan Milošević

Former president of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000.Slobodan Milošević began his career in 1984 were he was elected president of the Belgrade League of Communists City Committee. In 1988 he...
Murad I

Murad I (1326 – 1389) was the Ottoman Sultan from 1362 to 1389. He was a son of Orhan and the Valide Nilüfer Hatun.Murad I conquered Adrianople, renamed it to Edirne, and in 1363 made it the new capital of the Ottoman Sultanate. Then he further expanded t...
Lazar Hrebeljanović

Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović (1329 – 1389) was a medieval Serbian ruler who created the largest and most powerful state on the territory of the disintegrated Serbian Empire. Lazars state, referred to by historians as Moravian Serbia, comprised the bas...

About the author

ismail kadare

Ismail Kadare (also spelled Kadaré) was an Albanian novelist and poet. He has been a leading literary figure in Albania since the 1960s. He focused on short stories until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. In 1996 he became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, in 2009 the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts, and in 2015 the Jerusalem Prize. He has divided his time between Albania and France since 1990. Kadare has been mentioned as a possible recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. His works have been published in about 30 languages.

Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, in the south of Albania. His education included studies at the University of Tirana and then the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow, a training school for writers and critics.

In 1960 Kadare returned to Albania after the country broke ties with the Soviet Union, and he became a journalist and published his first poems.

His first novel, The General of the Dead Army, sprang from a short story, and its success established his name in Albania and enabled Kadare to become a full-time writer.

Kadare's novels draw on Balkan history and legends. They are obliquely ironic as a result of trying to withstand political scrutiny. Among his best known books are Chronicle in Stone (1977), Broken April (1978), and The Concert (1988), considered the best novel of the year 1991 by the French literary magazine Lire.

In 1990, Kadare claimed political asylum in France, issuing statements in favour of democratisation. During the ordeal, he stated that "dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship."