A tribute to Ismail Kadare, a writer who really deserved a Nobel Prize

Apart from Bob Dylan and Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s a fair bet that most people’s reaction to the Nobel prizewinners for literature this century is, who? Arguably the most recent, Jon Fosse, is an exception but the majority of winners don’t really stand up to the weight of the award. Annie Emaux? Abdulrazak Gurnah? Louise Gluck? It’s hard to avoid the impression that the judges were swayed by ethno-gender considerations rather than outright lifetime literary merit.

This week there died, and today was buried, one man who really did merit the award for which he was nominated 15 times, and really did want it and who never got it: Ismail Kadare. The 88-year-old may be unknown to most Brits, but that says more about the insularity of British literary culture than his merits. He was the real deal, a novelist who created something unique; a kind of allegorical symbolism which cut through time to say something about the eternal truths of despotism and liberty in telling a story about a different period and place.