Albanian Literature | Modern

Mimoza AHMETI

Mimoza Ahmeti (b. 1963) from Kruja is one of the ‘enfants terribles’ of the nineties, who set about to expand the horizons and explore the possibilities offered to her by her own senses. Dragging the nation, in her idiosyncratic manner, along the bumpy road to Europe, she has managed in recent years to provoke Albania’s impoverished and weary society into much needed reflection which, with time, may lead to new and more sincerely human values. After two volumes of verse in the late eighties, it was the fifty-three poems in the collection Delirium, Tirana 1994 (Delirium), which caught the public’s attention. Mimoza Ahmeti’s poetry has been well received by the new generation of readers in tune, for the first time, with Western culture. Her candid expressions of wide-eyed feminine desire and indulgence in sensual pleasures, and the crystalline fluidity of her language have already made of her a modern classic. The traditional polarization of male and female verse would seem to dissolve under the passionate force of her quill.