An Albanian dissident has beaten some of the world's best known writers to win the inaugural Man Booker International Prize.
Ismail Kadare was named last night as the recipient of the £60,000 award. His rivals for the prize included Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, Muriel Spark, Milan Kundera and Ian McEwan.
Mr Kadare's books were banned by the Communist regime in Albania and during the 1980s his work had to be smuggled out of the country by his French publishers.
He was granted political asylum in France in 1990 and has lived there ever since, stating: "Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible."
His novels and poems have been translated in more than 40 countries. His best known novel remains his first, The General of the Dead Army, written in 1963.
The former journalist said he felt "deeply honoured" to receive the award. "I am a writer from the Balkan Fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness - armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on," he said.
"My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realise that this region, to which my country, Albania, belongs, can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement in the field of the arts, literature and civilisation."
Professor John Carey, chair of the judges, said: "Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture - its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters. He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer."
The Man Booker International Prize is to be awarded every two years to a living author who has published fiction in English or whose work has been translated into English. Kadare will be presented with his award at a ceremony in Edinburgh on June 27th.