Loser

Fatos Kongoli (b. 1944) is one of the most forceful and convincing representatives of contemporary Albanian literature. He was born in the central Albanian town of Elbasan and raised in the capital, Tirana. As a young adult, during the tense years of the Sino-Albanian alliance, he was sent to Red China to study mathematics. Kongoli chose not to publish during the oppressive dictatorship in Albania but devoted his creative energies to an apolitical career as a mathematician There was, as he subsequently noted in an interview, ";no Marxist strategy for mathematics."; His narrative talent and individual style only emerged in the nineties, after the fall of the communist regime, when his telling and powerful narratives exposed the crimes visited upon the Albanian population by the regime. Fatos Kongoli is a classic example of a writer whose work was restricted by a totalitarian regime in eastern Europe.Translator Robert Elsie is a Canadian with a longstanding specialism in Albanian and Balkan history and literature. He has translated dozens of novels and stories, interviewed and promoted a range of authors and runs an informative and vitally important website 'Albanian Authors in Translation', which includes the largest selection of Albanian and Kosovan literature in English. He also maintains a website on the history of Albania. He is currently employed as an Interpreter by The Hague International Courts, where he translated at the trial of Slobodan Milosovic.Kongoli, Fatos is the author of 'Loser', published 2008 under ISBN 9781854114525 and ISBN 1854114522.