Eqrem BASHA
BIOGRAPHY
Eqrem Basha (b. 1948) is among the most respected contemporary
writers of Kosova in recent years. He was born in Dibra in the
western Albanian-speaking region of what is now the Republic
of Macedonia, but his life and literary production are intimately
linked to Kosova and its capital Prishtina, where he has lived
and worked for the past three decades. It was in the early 1970s,
during the only real years of freedom in Kosova, that Eqrem Basha
moved to Prishtina to study language and literature at the newly
created Albanian-language university there. He later worked for
Prishtina television as editor of the drama section, but was
fired for political reasons during the Serb takeover of the media
in 1989-1990. Basha is the author of eight volumes of innovative
verse spanning the years from 1971 to 1995, three volumes of
short stories and numerous translations (in particular French
literature and drama). He is currently in the publishing industry
in Prishtina. Eqrem Basha is an enigmatic poet. Perplexing, fascinating,
and difficult to classify in a literary sense, he succeeds in
transmitting a certain mystique to the inquisitive reader. At
one moment he seems coolly logical and shows an admirable ability
to reason deductively, and the next moment he is overcome by
absurd flights of fancy into a surrealistic world where apparently
nothing makes any sense. Basha has an urbane view of things and
delights in the daily absurdities of life. Nothing could be more
foreign to him than the inspiration many of his fellow poets
derive from the rich folklore traditions of the northern mountain
tribes and verse of social commitment. His verse is light, colloquial
and much less declamatory than that of many of his predecessors. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Kosova, Macedonia and Montenegro (late 20th
- 21st centuries)
