Category: Albanian Authors

Faik bey Konitza (1875-1942), also spelt Faik Konica, was perhaps the most influential of all Albanian writers and publishers of the turn of the twentieth century. He was born in April 1875 in the now Greek village of Konitza in the Pindus mountains, not far from the present Albanian border. After elementary schooling in Turkish…

Of all the prose writers of the period, none was more imposing and influential than Ernest Koliqi (1903-1975). Koliqi was born in Shkodra on 20 May 1903 and was educated at the Jesuit college of Arice in the Lombardian town of Brescia, where he became acquainted with Italian literature and culture and first began writing…

Naim Frashëri (1846-1900) is nowadays widely considered to be the national poet of Albania. He spent his childhood in the village of Frashër where he no doubt began learning Turkish, Persian and Arabic and where, at the Bektashi monastery, he was imbued with the spiritual traditions of the Orient. In Janina (Ioannina), Naim Frashëri attended…

Girolamo De Rada (1814-1903), known in Albanian as Jeronim De Rada, is not only the best known writer of Italo-Albanian literature but also the foremost figure of the Albanian nationalist movement in nineteenth-century Italy. Born the son of a parish priest of Greek rite in Macchia Albanese (Alb. Maqi) in the mountains of Cosenza, De…

Andon Zako Çajupi (1866-1930) was born in Sheper, a village in the Upper Zagoria region of southern Albania, as the son of a rich tobacco merchant, Harito Çako, who did business in Kavala and Egypt. The young Andon Zako, who usually preferred this spelling of his surname and was later to adopt the pseudonym Çajupi,…

Asdreni (1872-1947), pseudonym of Aleks Stavre Drenova, was born in the village of Drenova, about five kilometers from Korça in southeastern Albania. He attended a Greek-language elementary school in his native village and had just begun high school in Korça when his widowed father died, leaving the thirteen-year-old Aleks an orphan. In the autumn of…