What Ismail Kadare had written 20 years earlier for Nobel Prize in Literature, Peter Handke

This award is being largely contested, even signed petitions asking the Swedish academy to cancel, as Handke is known as a sympathiser of Slobodan Milosevic and remembered for Albanians as the man who mourned for the late Balkan dictator.

Everyone among us may have expected a reaction from our writer Ismail Kadare, who has been the favourite for Nobel for years. Kadare didn't comment on this award... But Kadare talked about Handke here 20 years ago.

The literary paper “Exibris” has published today Kadare's position for Peter Handken, in his journal on Kosovo “RRa, and we have seen”.

ISMAIL KADAR, April 20, 1999

Austrian television requires an opinion on Peter Handkes' attitude. In Austria and Germany, there are fierce campaigns against him. That attitude, which is the truth, more than anger, has caused me grief. As is the case with people you know. As with behaviors that change within a mystery.

Austria's most famous writer. Slovenian mother. Francophone. For years, being adviser to the Austrian publishing house “Residenz Verlag” is the one who proposed my translation books.

I met him years ago in Paris. Austria's Embassy in France invited us both to dinner with the women. His French wife is admirable.

I can't guess what she was bit by. All that rage against Bosnian writers, all that zeal to protect Serb crimes in Bosnia and then Kosovo.

A Croatian writer tries to explain with its beginning the fririds. I can't believe it.

Meanwhile, from dinner at the Austrian Embassy, I remember a phrase of his. A rather special phrase, put to some sort of grief: “I am no longer known as before”.

Could the Side of Evil Be There? Maybe, why not.