Well it’s old news now (announced last Thursday) but the winner of the inaugural 2005 Man Booker International Prize is Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré.

Don’t say, who? as I sadly did, go to the Man Booker site and read up, so you can spout wisely at your next dinner party (still waiting for the invite, actually). Translations of his work have been published in over 40 countries worldwide, so you’d think one would have heard something… sigh.

Anyone who does know the work of the man judged the best living writer in the world (this year), do please feel free to comment. Professor John Carey, Chair of the judges, did:

Ismail 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.

And Kadaré comments:

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, and so on.

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.

Ismail will receive the prize of £60,000 and a trophy at the Award Ceremony on 27 June in Edinburgh and will then choose one or more of his translators to win the translator’s prize of £15,000.

Meanwhile, if you want to brush up on some reading, the following Kadaré titles have been translated into English:

The General of the Dead Army
The Three Arched Bridge
Broken April
Chronicle in Stone
Durontine
The File on H
The Concert
The Palace of Dreams
Albanian Spring
The Pyramid
Elegy for Kosovo
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
The Successor (forthcoming, January 2006)
Agamemnon’s Daughter (forthcoming, date TBC)