The Palace of Dreams

About the Author

Born in 1936 in the Albanian mountain town of Girokaster, near the Greek border, Ismail Kadare studied in Tirana and at the Gorki Institute, Moscow. He is Albania’s greatest living poet and novelist, whose works have been translated worldwide. He established an uneasy modus vivendi with the Communist authorities until their attempts to turn his reputation to their advantage drove him in October 1990 to seek asylum in France, for, as he says, “Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible…. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.”

The Palace of Dreams, which appeared in Albania in 1981 and was immediately banned, arose out of Kadare’s long-nurtured ambition to invent a hell of his own. “I kept weighing up what an ambitious and over-fanciful proposal this was, though,” he wrote, “after those unknown Egyptians, after Virgil, Saint Augustine and, above all, Dante….”