“Farewell, old friend – may you find peace beyond,” Rama wrote in a message posted on social media.

Zheji, a longtime figure in Albania’s media landscape, worked as a television host, editorial writer and political commentator.

He headed several print and broadcast outlets, including the national broadcaster RTSH and the Albanian Telegraphic Agency (ATA), and was widely regarded as a key voice in shaping public debate.

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In a long message of condolences from the Élysée Palace in Paris, Macron said that Kadare lived and created as a free man, in a dictatorial country.

In 2023, President Macron honoured Kadare in Tirana with the Legion of Honour, recognizing his courageous stand against authoritarianism.

“Today, a writer who embodied, through his life, his work and his personality, the enrichment of dialogue, the strength of the European spirit and France’s welcoming vocation, died. The Franco-Albanian writer Ismail Kadare left us this Monday.

He was one of those for whom writing is a struggle; one of those whose every word is torn from silence, every line risks weighing down their report, and those whose every novel may become the very epitaph of their career.  Because he lived and created as a free man, in a country that was not: post-war Soviet Albania, under the iron yoke of Enver Hoxha.

But the discovery of literature opened the shores of a new world to the adolescent. Reading Cervantes, Homer and Gogol, he strengthened his intellectual resistance. So much so that the indoctrination of his literature teachers slipped off him, at the University of Tirana as at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, temple of official literature. Instead of swelling the ranks of the “elite troop of socialist realism”, as it was called, he joined the resistance fighters of freedom of style. His great novel of 1963, The General of the Dead Army, was tolerated because its theme was disconcerting, because its dreamlike quality thwarted communist labels: the exhumation of soldiers from the Second World War in front of a priest and an Italian soldier, under the Albanian rain that never stops falling. On the other hand, The Monster, in 1965, and The Winter of the Great Solitude, in 1973, made him a pariah, because in them he denounced the intellectual oppression of the Tirana of the time. Twice accused of inciting rebellion, he was subjected to a period of manual labour in the depths of the countryside, the story he has written about.

After The Palace of Dreams, in 1981, the axe fell: “enemy of the people”. Banned from publishing, he decided to seek political asylum. So he turned to the country that had been the first to translate his books, the first to be passionate about his work beyond its borders. With his publisher, Claude Durand, head of Fayard publishing, he planned a great escape to France in 1990, yet another blow to the wall of the dictatorship: in Tirana, his departure led to the first student protests in over forty years.

From then on, from the capital of France to that of an Albania returned to democracy and finally returned to itself, he shared his existence between words and things, men and countries. From his walks in Tirana rediscovered, from this table of the Rostand café where he put down his notebook and his pen every morning, texts were born out of time, at the crossroads of myths and worlds, from the imagination of the pyramid of Cheops to that of Tirana, between the gates of Luxembourg, the banks of Cornouaille and the walls of Troy. They constantly remind us how Europe is the continent of the common, how its history is a shared history.

The President of the Republic salutes a free spirit, who participated in this great awakening of the peoples which lifted the iron curtain, and honoured France by taking it as the asylum of his creation. He addresses to his relatives, to his readers, and to the Albanian people, his heartfelt condolences,” French President said in his message of condolences.

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