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Kadare, fled Albania in 1990 and received political asylum in France, a few months before Albania's communist regime ended. Before he managed to leave his homeland, his French publisher, Editions Fayar, smuggled his work into France.

"Ismail Kadare is a writer who maps a whole culture - its history, its passion, its folklore, its politics, its disasters," said John Carey, chairman of the judging committee. "He is a universal writer in a tradition of storytelling that goes back to Homer."

Kadare said he hoped the prize, given for his body of work, would give the world a different perspective on the tiny Balkan country and its neighbors.

"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.

"My firm hope is that European and world opinion may henceforth realize that this region ... can also give rise to other kinds of news and be the home of other kinds of achievement, in the field of the arts, literature and civilization," he said.

Kadare, became famous in his homeland with the 1963 publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. His other works include The Concert, and The Palace of Dreams. The Man Booker International Prize which is in it's first, is open to authors of all nationalities whose work has been either written or translated widely into English.

The $109,000 prize will be awarded for a body of work every two years.

The existing annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded for a single work, and is open only to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies.

Among the 18 authors shortlisted for the international prize, were Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Kenzaburo Oe. Other finalists included Philip Roth, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera and Doris Lessing.

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