In Scotland to accept the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, “Albanian dissident and author Ismail Kadare said Monday that his small victories in smuggling work out of his homeland inspired him to continue writing in the face of oppression.” As an Associated Press wire story reports, “Kadare’s works were banned by Albania’s former Communist regime and his manuscripts had to be smuggled out of the country to his French publishers,” until he was granted political asylum by France in 1990. “Each time we were able to publish anything, even just a page, we got a great moral satisfaction out of it. Each occasion was a great triumph,” he explained to reporters in Edinburgh. “That’s what kept us going throughout this whole period. Otherwise we would have gone mad or we would have just given up.” He also noted “the fashion now in the former communist countries of the ex-Soviet Bloc for people to say ‘I could have been a writer but I wasn’t allowed.’ The people entitled to speak about that period are the people who did something and not the people who kept silent and have retrospective nostalgia.”