Kadare grew up during the years of World War II, witnessing the occupation of his home country by fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. He attended primary and secondary schools in Gjirokastra, and went on to study languages and literature at the Faculty of History and Philology of the University of Tirana. In 1956 Kadaré received a teacher's diploma. He also studied at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moskow.

Famous writer in Albania, he grew to become well known in the world as well. He is published in up to forty languages all over the world and is considered one of the best writers of our times and a literature classic of the 20th century. Frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a leading figure of Albanian cultural life from the 1960s. During the terror of the Hoxha regime, Kadaré attacked on totalitarianism and the doctrines of socialist realism with subtle allegories, although as a committed Marxist he officially supported the liberation of Albania from its backward past.

In Albania Kadaré first won fame as a poet. His first novel, The General of the Dead Army (1963), is a study of postwar Albania and begins in a pouring rain. It is perhaps still among Kadaré's best-known works abroad.

Kadaré served as a delegate to the People's Assembly in 1970 and he was given freedom to travel and to publish abroad. In The Castle (1970), a story of Albania's struggle against the Ottoman Turks, and The Three-Arched Bridge (1978), a chronicle of the events surrounding the construction of a bridge across a river, Kadaré depicted the feudal Albania. After offending the authorities with a politically satirical poem in 1975, he was forbidden to publish for three years.

The Palace of Dreams (1981) was a political allegory of totalitarianism, set in an Ottoman capital. The central character is a young man, Mark-Alem, whose job is to select, sort, and interpret the dreams of the imperial populace in order to discover the "master-dream" that will predict the overthrow of the rulers. The basically humorous novel for others than the Albanian authorities was almost immediately banned after its publication.

In October 1991 Kadaré emigrated to Paris where he has lived with his family ever since. The Concert (1988) was considered the best novel of the year 1991 by the French literary magazine Lire. The story is laid against Albania's break with China. In exile Kadaré has expressed his disappointment and bitterness. The Pyramid (1992) was set in Egypt in the twenty-sixth century B.C. and after. In the novel Kadaré attacked Hoxha's fondness for elaborate statutes, the pyramid form also reflecting any dictators love for hierarchy.

Selected works:

• The General of the Dead Army (1963)
• The Wedding (1968)
• The Castle (1970)
• Chronicle in Stone (1971)
• The Great Winter (1977)
• The Three-Arched Bridge (1978)
• Broken April (1978)
• On the Lay of the Knights (1979)
• The Autobiography of the People in Verse (1980)
• Doruntine (1980)
• The Palace of Dreams (1981)
• The Concert (1988)
• Albanian Spring (1991)
• The Pyramid (1991)
• L'ombre (1994)
• La legende des legendes (1995)
• Visage des Balkans (1995)
• Dialog me Alain Bosquet (1996)
• Temps barbares: De l'Albanie au Kosovo (1999)
• Froides fleurs d'avril (2000)
• Elegy for Kosovo (2000)
• Spring Flowers, Spring Frost (2002)
• The File on H. (2002)
• The Successor (2006)