text:  Born in 1936 in Gjirokastor in southern Albania, Kadare studied literature in Tirana and Moscow. His return home in 1960 coincided with Albania's diplomatic rift with the Soviet Union, which Kadare chronicled in his work The Great Winter, which has been criticized for praising the communist Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. Kadare did not help matters with his honest admission that he never considered himself a dissident, insisting he was not a political writer.