Born in Tirana, Albania, in 1951, Fatos Lubonja is a writer committed above all to denouncing the abuses of power in any form. His father, director of the Albanian Radio and Television, was arrested in 1973 by Enver Hoxha's regime on charges of being a liberal and was proclaimed Enemy of the People. Fatos was arrested, too, in 1974, during investigations against his father, when the Sigurimi found his hidden writings critical of the regime. He was proclaimed, too, Enemy of the People, expelled by the Albanian Labour Party and sent to a gulag, where he remained for 17 years, during which he was also forced to work in the mines. He was released in 1991, after the collapse of the Communist regime in Albania. What remains of those painful and interminable years is "The diary of an intellectual in an Albanian gulag. The redemption of conscience from the barbarity of real socialism" (Marco, 1994), which earned him the 2002 Moravia prize.
Aware of the risks hidden behind regime change, including that of an uncritical adherence to Western values, he believes it is essential that Albania reflects on its history and its savior myths, be they those of nineteenth-century nationalism, those of communism or those of Western capitalist consumerism. For this purpose he founded the magazine "Perpjekja" ("Commitment") in Tirana in 1994 with an editorial team of young intellectuals. In 2003 he received the Herder prize and in 2004 it was published in Italy, with the preface by Dacia Maraini, "Interview on Albania. From Enver Hoxha's prisons to wild liberalism" (Il Ponte, 2004), where Lubonja, as a writer and journalist, expresses his analyzes on the past, present and future of Albania. Since 2003 he has lived between Tirana and Italy, in a small town in Tuscany, together with his Italian partner and their daughter.