ARDIAN KYCYKU - Pen names: Ardian-Christian Kyçyku / Kuciuk, writer of Albanian and Romanian expression, essayist, editor and translator born on the 23rd of August 1969, Pogradec, Albania. Bachelor of Arts at the Tirana University (Albania), Faculty of History and Philology (1991); Doctor in Comparative and Universal Literature at the Bucharest University - "Trends in European Modernism and Their Influences on Albanian In-Between-Wars Literature"; Doctor-ship at the Faculty of Theology at the Bucharest University - "The Relationship Between God and Cosmos in the Monotheistic Religions"; Professor; since March 2012 he is the Rector of the Romanian University of Science and Art“Gheorghe Cristea” in Bucharest. Co-founder and Executive President of European Academy of Performing Arts (since 2013) Since 1998: co-founder and co-director of bilingual European magazine for culture and traditions "Haemus", which first appeared in Bucharest in 1998 and now has an archive of over 5.500 pages with fragments from the work of over 250 writers, thinkers and European intellectuals; also, Haemus dedicated special editions to the Greek, Turkish, Italian, Chinese, Swiss, Jewish and other cultures and civilizations and to the Albanian and Romanian exile. Editor-en-Chief of “ComunIQue” and “euArts” magazines. He is Full member of the Writers Union of Romania, full member of the Writers Union of Albania, full member of Académie Européenne des Arts, and a Correspondent member of Central European Academy of Science and Art. Member of the Writers Association in Bucharest, founding member of the Albanian Cultural Association “Haemus”. National Literary Prize of Albania "Silver Quill” for "Pearl/s" (selected prose), Tirana, 2013 Honorary Citizen of Pogradec, Pogradec, 2014 Kult Academy Prize "The best book / The best author", Tirana, 2015 B o o k s written and published in Albanian: In the stone’s empire, novel The Dead Folk, novel Night After Year Zero, novel Muse of the Game, trilogy The Translation or the Life of a Slave that does not Swear He Can See, novel Rivers of Sahara, novel The Appetite for Heaven Bread, novel Diva or Flowers Devorator, novel Useless Angels, novel The Crystal and the hyenas, novel Eyes, novel The conquest of Crazystan, prosa Instead of Eternity, theatre Home, novel Kiss Me You, Skeleton, novel The viceBook, theatre The Neutral Blood, theatre Father, novel Your Excellency, theatre A world away, theatre Pearl/s, selected prose Unseen stories, prose Ki$land – a novel with childhood, novel B o o k s written and published in Romanian: The year in which the Swan was Invented, novel The Sweet Secret of Craziness, novel A Glorious and Dying Tribe - The Saga of a Forgotten Love at the Last Sight, prose and theater Epigone God, novel-essay Trilogy, anthologycal volume An alphabet of Albanian poetry (anthology, 101 Albanian poets in Romanian) Time of the Substitutes, interview Siege – a novel with a few quotation marks Ex – novel with love & conspiracy Introduction into Semiotics, - university lectures The Signs and the Citadel - university lectures Empatycon or The Book of Untimely Life, novel Space for a single doll, - an movie to be narrated / a story to be filmed Sky in an envelope, - an movie to be narrated / a story to be filmed Casting or the Curtain doesn't separate anything anymore, theatre Comunicare in-humanum est, essays Outism and Insomnia, essays The Epocalypse, novel R e f e r e n c e s: [Ardian-Christian Kyçyku is a writer of Albanian descent, who settled in Romania in 1991. He wrote 20 novels in Albanian, and, during the last 10 years, he published a few novels and stories in a perfectly assimilated Romanian language. In Albania, he is vaguely known; here, in Romania, not even that. But his books are a revelation. I will mention here his recently published novel A Dying, Glorious Tribe (1998). In culturally normal conditions, Kyçyku would be seen as an Eastern-European Marquez. But he is just considered an "artistic brain," transferred from Albania to Romania. And he has the weird status "between a professional cultural renegade and an old cosmopolitan," as he defines himself. I consider him a Romanian writer, in a space that used to be called Thracia a long time ago, from the Carpathians to his Illyria. Kyçyku is the wonder child of a Romania remembering she was once Thracia… and who is today stressed out because she cannot find any collapsing or perhaps redemption allies. Plural Magazine, Romania's Thracian Memory, Bucharest, Vasile Andru] [33 episodes from a saga that is foretokening a new Balkan mythology, a violent and sensual structure which perverts the logos by its hyperbole and oxymoron in the guise of imperceptible lows; 33 steps towards the age of salvation and of the redemption of the sins on the cross that is adulated with a fervor which does not excludes the polemic; 33 punching pieces which transforms the history into a poem and the poem into the life of a poet maddened with the world’s madness. What could be sweeter than this mystery which seems that it is writing by itself? Ardian-Christian Kyçyku is one of the great revelations of the contemporary prose. art Panorama, Bucharest, Dan-Silviu Boerescu] [This suave rowdy intellectual is doomed to remain the same lucid ultra sensitive person, a modern aéd of the incessantly shaken times from this accursed part of the world. The young prose writer, as some people called him, is actually old and haunted like Balkans. But he is a peaceful haunted man, who is moving among the Sweet secrets of the birth and of the death, of the Beginning and the End, disdainfully as if he were an undying man or as if he were a rational being that has come from another world. Romanian Reality, Bucharest, Corneliu Vlad] [Ardian-Christian Kyçyku: there must not lose sight of the event character of his presence now and here, in the Romanian literature, generally speaking. He is not an Albanian who writes in Romanian (…) but an Albanian writer on the all strength of the world, who decided to write into Romanian repeating, in a way, the experience of Panait Istrati. Ardian-Christian Kyçyku is a Panait Istrati of the Albanian literature who has chosen the Romanian instead of the French language. The Day, Bucharest, Mircea Martin] [(…) He has been lying in wait for a few years, in the Bucharest town of Romania, and almost each year, he brings out a novel from his literary “factory”. We are speaking about novels of an extraordinary and incontestable value, such as Eyes, Superfluous Angels, Home and actually, all the books this inspired man of the Albanian letters has written (…). Let the jury from Stockholm and the wide public opinion find out that the young Albanian writer, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku, is going to be one day the “rapper”, even younger than Orhan Pamuk maybe, of that high distinction in literature, of that sometimes “rebellious” reward, called Nobel. The Voice, Prishtina; TemA, Tirana, Bajram Sefaj] [This is what A.-Ch. Kyçyku does: he feeds us with stories of a kind of enchantment very closed to that one belonging to “One Thousand and One Nights”. It is not only the enchantment the fact that brings them together, but also the tension experienced by the narrator, a tension induced by the realization of the failure which can be fatal (both to the narrator and to the listener). We have to reckon with a writer who forces his limits without any mercy, who does not feel the need to spare anybody and so much the less to spare himself. […] . A visionary fiction writer, of an amazing force, he practices a real maieutics applied to the universal memory and he can not help drilling into the stone depths of the myth for drawing out the bloody result with his both arms and for throwing it in front of us with a torrent of parables designated to hide rather than to reveal. It always astonishes the natural process (in this case) through which the universal distopia comes into being in an “environment” so much placed in the normality. Sunday’s Newspaper, Bucharest, Bogdan Alexandru Stănescu] [Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has even now arrived faraway, and very upwards with his literary work. There, to the faraway and to the very upwards not those with powerful legs for walking and those who know to cut figures can arrive, but those that the destiny has chosen them. And fortunately, the destiny rarely and faultlessly chooses. Athena’s Newspaper, Athens; TemA, Tirana, Hiqmet Meçaj] [Beyond the “magic realism” that seems to characterize the epic substance (and the ontological vision) of his prose works (an unusual mixture between a realism, sometimes a violent one, lacking illusions, of a Cioranian kind, and a “fabulous” imagination, a folklore, mythical and raving one, from a “suspended time” which makes an outsized reality and which intensified it in the same way as it happens in the Eliade’s literary world) it surprises also the unprecedented expressivity of the Romanian language used by Ardian-Christian Kyçyku in his writings, as though he tacitly transgressed the entire occult sigh of the Albanian language into the adopted language. Romanian Messenger, Bucharest, Ştefan Ioanid] [Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has two literary home countries, glorified by him in everything he writes. For Albany he feels the responsibility one has in front of his birth and first words place. Romania is a spiritual option that he could never change with anything else. As a writer who has come from a realm mirrored into the mythical Ohrid, and from a maiming, wild ideological repression, his prose’s history is actually the triumph of a huge talent. The Day, Bucharest, Iolanda Malamen] […The writer seems to strengthen the fact that small countries and their languages of a limited circulation can offer important authors and extraordinary books as a unique chance for entering into the European circulation of values, for compelling recognition to the European consciousness (…). The Glorious and Dying Tribe is a fundamental book of Albania, written in the Romanian language as though Romanian became suddenly one of the official languages of UNO. The author’s option is a bet made with Romanian language and finally won. In this way the interested Romanian speakers have the possibility to know everything about Albania and especially about the Albanian soul through its mythical-poetic avatars. They have no more to do but to read The Glorious and Dying Tribe. There are fierce and pagan scenes with a great plasticity that alternate with scenarios of a kind of fabulous which is contiguous to transcendentalism, to hyper sense of perception or to bibloskagathia.” Romanian Life, Bucharest, Geo Vasile] [Being of only 35 years old and owning a vital, rarely met disquietude, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has left 21 volumes for the cultures of the two countries:12 in the Albanian language and 9 in Romanian (these last ones were written in only eight years). In spite of a “diplomatic” and hesitating silence of the autochthonous specialized criticism, both facts, of being considered and suited on the same level with a talented writer such as Ismail Kadare, in his origin country, and also of being assimilated with a kind of writer such as Márquez (and thus being called “Márquez of the Balkans”), in Romania, could say a lot and it even does this. After all, we have to reckon with a great prose writer of whom we should be proud he is breathing around. I assert this with all the honesty I am capable of after I have read greedily four volumes (appeared in the Romanian language, of course), each time mumbling the bitter taste of a reading that seems too quickly ended one. I assert this after I have read The Glorious and Dying Tribe (the epopee of an oblivion), an extraordinary book, a real Balkan epopee of a world rate, a book that any literature, no matter how great it is, would be proud with. Agora On-line, Paul Vinicius] [Arriving at the Dantesque half of his life, Ardian-Christian Kyçyku has such a bibliography that the Romanian writing seniors would envy him. The literary Tirana, fettered by a schizophrenically dictatorship of the highest level, was giving the national award to Kyçyku as far back as 1988, for the novel The Triumph of Proteus. A symbolic title! This because Proteus is the author himself, with his vacillation between short story and novel, between literature and painting, philology and theology, poetry and journalism. This row of the doublets could continue. It has been said, using a fortunate formula, that this Albanian settled down in Romania, might be called “Márquez of he Balkans”. It is true, but his prose which is sometimes laconic, sometimes voluminous, clear up not only the narrow geography of an accursed space, but also the authentic human-being condition. Kyçyku is a philosopher deep inside his soul. He is a philosopher for whom the world has no longer had secrets, even if it is hiding into the darkness for the time being. Adam Publishing House, Bucharest, Ioan Adam] [Therefore, you esteem reader are in front of an exceptional writing. It is a writing of a man descended from the aerie of the eagles. It is a writing which belongs to a man willing to impart us the secrets of gods. Siege, first edition, Bucharest, Val Popa]