A Dictator Calls

Resumen del libro

**LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2024**'Comrade Stalin wishes to speak with you.'In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam. In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history. Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny.

The telling brings to light uncanny parallels with Kadare's experience writing under dictatorship, when he received an unexpected phone call of his own. Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson'Kadare is one of Europe's most consistently interesting and powerful contemporary novelists, a writer whose stark, memorable prose imprints itself on the reader's consciousness,' Los Angeles Times

Biografía del autor

Ismaíl Kadaré (Albania, 1936) está considerado un clásico contemporáneo de la literatura universal. Intelectual comprometido, su disidencia con el autárquico régimen comunista albanés le llevó a exiliarse en Francia en los años noventa. Poeta y novelista, es autor de una amplia obra, traducida a más de cuarenta lenguas. A lo largo de su carrera literaria, Kadaré ha cosechado numerosos premios entre los que cabe destacar el Man Booker International Prize 2005 y el Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras 2009.