Ismail Kadare

Tickets £5. " A rare major literary appearance by the world-renowned Albanian poet and novelist and winner of the Man International Booker Prize - in conversation with his translator David Bellos



To celebrate the first ever English translation of his most powerful novel The Siege ... (more)and to talk about his other great works including The Palace of Dreams, The Successor, Agamemnon's Daughter and Broken April.



Kadare's The Siege chronicles the bloody and complex struggle between the Ottoman Army and the inhabitants of a Christian Fortress in the mountains of Albania that ends in defeat and desolation for both sides. A long meditation on human relations, human folly, the ambiguities of power and the meaning of history. The Successor is simultaneously a mystery novel and a historical novel based on the sudden, mysterious death of the man who had been handpicked to succeed the hated Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? Agamemnon's Daughter is the prequel to The Successor, written in Albania and smuggled into France a few pages at a time in the 1980s. A psychologically incisive tale of a disappointed lover's odyssey through a single day, we are given a true sense of how hard it can be to remain human in a world ruled by fear."