John Hodgson on Ismail Kadare and 'A Dictator Calls' (Albanian Novel : Long listed for the International Booker Prize - 2024)

Harshaneeyam

Today, we have Distinguished Albanian translator John Hodgson with us. He is talking about his international Booker-longlisted rendition of 'A Dictator Calls' written by Albanian Writer Ismail Kadare. The author and translator were previously longlisted for the novel The Traitors Niche for the Man Booker International prize in 2017.

So far, John Hodgson has translated seven novels by Ismail Kadare.

John Hodgson’s origins are in Tyneside. He studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Newcastle. In 1980, the British Council sent him to teach English at the University of Kosovo in Prishtina, where he learned Albanian, mainly from his students. After the fall of communism in Albania in 1991, he went to Tirana and lived there for five years. Following the Balkan wars, he worked as a translator and interpreter for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, interpreting at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. He translated three books by Fatos Lubonja, most recently Like a Prisoner, a collection of short stories describing life in Enver Hoxha’s labour camps. He has written in Albanian a memoir of Kosovo in the 1980s, Eardhmja në të kaluarën (The Future in the Past), published in Prishtina in 2022.

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