In a bizarre commentary for The Prospect, Julian Evans admits recent Man Booker International winner Ismail Kadare was a part of the brutally repressive government of dictator Enver Hoxha and yet hails Kadare as “a worthy laureate.” Evans argues that Kadare was writing critically of the Hoxha regime in novels he smuggled out of the country to publish in France (although Evans does not explain why there were no repercussions for those books against Kadare in Albania) and says he may have owed his survival to the fact that he came from the same small town as Hoxha. Simultaneously, Evans also points out that Kadare’s “cohabitation” with the Hoxha government was so widely criticized in Albania it “led to his being dubbed the ‘official dissident.'”