Ali Podrimja

Who was Ali Podrimja?

Ali Podrimja was an Albanian poet. He was born in Gjakova, at the time part of Italian-controlled Albania under Italy.

After a difficult childhood due to the death of his parents, he studied Albanian language and literature in Pristina until 1966. Author of over a dozen volumes of cogent and assertive verse since 1961, he was recognized both in Kosovo and in Albania itself as a leading and innovative poet. Indeed, he was considered by many to be the most typical representative of modern Albanian verse in Kosovo and was certainly the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation.

Podrimja's first collection of elegiac verse, Thirrje, was published while he was still at secondary school in Gjakova. Subsequent volumes introduced new elements of the poet's repertoire, a proclivity for symbols and allegory, revealing him as a mature symbolist at ease in a wide variety of rhymes and meters.

In the early eighties, he published the masterful collection Lum Lumi, which marked a turning point not only in his own work but also in contemporary Kosovo verse as a whole.