With Migjeni (1911-1938), contemporary Albanian poetry begins its course. Migjeni, pen name of Millosh Gjergj...

By far the greatest and most influential figure of Albanian literature in the first half of the twentieth century was the Franciscan pater Gjergj Fishta (1871-1940) who more than any other writer gave artistic expression to the searching soul of the now sovereign Albanian nation. Lauded and celebrated

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Mitrush Kuteli (1907-1967), pseudonym of Dhimitër Pasko, known in Romanian as Dimitrie Pascu, was born in Pogradec on the banks of Lake Ohrid on 13 September 1907 and attended a foreign-language school in Greece (a Romanian commercial college in Thessalonika) and later moved to...

The writer widely considered to be the father of modern Albanian poetry in Yugoslavia, Esad Mekuli (1916-1993), was not born in Kosova itself but in the mountain village of Plava on the Montenegrin-Albanian border where national traditions are still revered. Mekuli went to school in Peja on the...

Classical poet Ndre Mjeda (1866-1937) bridges the gap between late nineteenth-century Rilindja culture and the dynamic literary creativity of the independence period. Mjeda was born on 20 November 1866 in Shkodra and, like so many other Gheg writers of the period, was educated by...