This year, Kadare’s A Dictator Calls (Alb. Kur sunduesit grinden), translated by John Hodgson, has been shortlisted for the literary prize.

“A Dictator Calls” was on the International Booker Prize’s 2024 longlist, announced on March 11.

The book, originally published in 2018 in Albania, offers a meditation on Soviet Russia, authoritarianism, power structures and the relationship between writers and tyranny.

The narration centers on the reportedly Joseph Stalin’s phone call with the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of Pasternak’s fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam – a man who had expressed criticism of the Soviet regime. Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Booker Prize, reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history.

Albanian author Ismail Kadare was awarded was awarded the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

/u.sh/