Friday, June 3 2005 12:31 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

London: Noted Albanian poet and novelist, Ismail Kadare has won the first-ever Man Booker International Prize, thus gaining recognition as one of the world's finest writers.

The 69-year-old Kadare was chosen for the inaugural award for his body of work, which includes novels like 'Broken April,' 'Spring Frost' and 'The General of the Dead Army.'

"Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture - its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters," critic John Carey, who led a three member panel of judges, said.

"He is a universal writer in a tradition of story-telling that goes back to Homer," he added.

Kadare will receive a prize of 60,000 Pounds plus a trophy in a ceremony at Edinburgh on June 27, with an extra 15,000 Pounds for a translator of his choice.

According to a statement, Kadare, who fled to France in 1990 as a refugee before the collapse of dictator Enver Hoxha's Communist regime, said, "I feel deeply honoured."

"I am a writer from the Balkan fringe, a part of Europe which has long been notorious exclusively for news of human wickedness - armed conflicts, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and so on," he said.

Eighteen other authors were short-listed for the honour, including the late Saul Bellow, Germany's Gunter Grass, Czech- born Milan Kundera, Egypt's Naguib Mahfouz, US writers Philip Roth and John Updike, and Canada's Margaret Atwood.