Ardian-Christian Kyçyku

Ardian Kycyku – Pen names: Ardian-Christian Kyçyku / Kuciuk, writer in the Albanian and Romanian languages, born on the 23rd of August 1969, Pogradec, Albania. Author of more than 55 original books (novels, short stories, plays, scenarios, scientific studies, essays, anthologies, translations).

Bachelor of Arts at the Tirana University (Albania), Faculty of History and Philology (Albanian Language – Albanian and Universal Literature, 1991, Diploma’s work: ‘Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud – communions and differences’)

Doctor in Comparative and Universal Literature at the Bucharest University – ‘Directions in European Modernism and their Echo in the Interwar Period of Albanian Literature’ (1998)

University Professor (Semiotics and Communication / Techniques for writing the scientific texts). Between 2008 and 2020 he was a dean and a rector.

Since 1998 he is the co-founder and co-director of European Review “Haemus”, which has an archive of over 9.000 pages.

Founding member of the Albanian Cultural Association “Haemus”


B o o k s written and published in Albanian:

In the empire of stone, novel, Tirana 1993

The Death Family, novel, Pristina1998, Tirana 2020

The Night After Year Zero, novel, Pristina1999

The Muse of the Game, trilogy, Bucharest 1999

The Translation or the Life of a Slave that doesn’t Swear He Can See, novel, Bucharest 1999

The Rivers of Sahara, novel, Tirana 2000, Bucharest 2010, Pristina2017

The Appetite for Heaven Bread, novel, Tirana 2000

Diva or Flowers Devourer, novel, Elbasan 2000

Useless Angels, novel, Pristina2002

The Crystal and the hyenas, novel, Pristina2002, Bucharest 2015

Eyes, novel, Bucharest 2004, Pristina2005, Tirana 2008

The conquest of Crazystan, short stories, Pristina2004

Instead of Eternity, play, Pristina2007

Home, novel, Pristina/ Berlin 2014

Kiss Me You, Skeleton, Bucharest 2007

The viceBook, play, Bucharest 2007

The Neutral Blood, play, Bucharest 2008

The Father, novel, Bucharest 2008, Tirana 2017

Your Excellency, play, Pristina2009

One world away, play, Bucharest 2012

Pearl/s, selected short stories, Pogradec 2012

Unseen stories, short stories, Pristina/ Bucharest 2013

Ki$land – a novel with childhood, Tirana 2014

Like, play, Bucharest 2016, Pristina2017

Trialogue [an interdisciplinary work regarding the links between literature and exile and the languages it chooses in order to protect Memory and Metaphor], 365 pages in academic format, in Albanian, with abstracts in Romanian and English, Bucharest 2016, work-in-progress

Incógnito [Fragments from the life of guardians and vice versa], novel, Tirana 2016

The Threshold or Death writes with two hands, novel, Bucharest 2019

Homo ex machina – three plays, 2019

Anonima or Tirana in the shadow of a passenger, 2020

Childhood cr(imes)eations, 2021



B o o k s written and published in Romanian:

The year in which the Swan was Invented, novel, Bucharest 1997

The Sweet Secret of Madness, 33 proses + 22 original graphics, Bucharest 1998

A Glorious and Dying Tribe – The Saga of an Oblivion, Bucharest 1998

Love at Last Sight, stories and a play, Bucharest 2000

Epigone God, monograph, Timisoara – Bratislava, 2000

Trilogy, three novels, Bucharest 2002

An alphabet of Albanian poetry (anthology, 101 Albanian poets in Romanian), Bucharest 2003

Time of the Substitutes, interview, Bucharest 2003

Siege – a novel with very few inverted commas, Bucharest 2004, 2007

Ex – novel with love & conspiracy, Bucharest 2008, 2010

Introduction to Semiotics, university lectures, Constanta 2005

The Signs and the Citadel, university lectures, Bucharest 2007

Empatycon or The Book of Premature Life, novel, Bucharest 2008

Space for a only one doll – a film to be narrated / a story to be filmed, Bucharest 2008

The sky in an envelope – a film to be narrated / a story to be filmed, Bucharest 2010

Casting or the Curtain doesn't separate anything anymore, play, Bucharest 2011

My last Million, anthology of Balkan literary texts, 2013

Comunicare in-humanum est, interdisciplinary studies, Bucharest 2014

Outism and Insomnia, interdisciplinary studies, Bucharest 2014

The Epocalypse, novel, Bucharest 2014

Instead of Eternity, play, 2015

A grammar of Exile [in two "foreign" languages], essay, 2015

The genre – a play with an act and a murder, play, 2019

Prompters’ exodus – stereodrama, 2022

Print(ing)house - monodrama, 2022

The Co-author – broken poems, 2023

* Books and / or fragments translated in Hungarian, Italian, English, German, Serbian, French, Greek etc.

Long, medium and short film scripts

The Supplement – The Movie of a Return / The Return of a Movie (AL), The Rhyme (AL), A Guide (RO), Relationshop (RO) – film / ballet play, Sticking (RO)

Short and very short films (as Scriptwriter, Cinematographer and Editor)

A bridge, Lines, The Seat, Barlove, A lesson, the Point, Librorum, Umbra ex machina, Dearection, Tubim (rrëfilm – AL) / Assembly, A Facemap, Lost masterpiece/s, Mirrors in progress – A short semiotic view on the Ingmar Bergman phenomenon – on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@arkycyku

Videolectures: https://keynema.blogspot.com

[Awards and honors: National Literary Prize of Albania ‘Silver Pen’, Tirana 2013; Honorary Citizen of Pogradec 2014; Kult Academy Prize ‘The best book / The best author’, Tirana 2015 and 2018; Prize II ‘Katarina Josip’ for Albanian Original Drama, Pristina2016; Grand Prix at Très Court International Film Festival – Cluj-Napoca 2017; Ambassador of the Nation, Tirana 2019]

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]

Read more of this interview.

Website: http://www.ardiankycyku.blogspot.com
Facebook: Facebook profile
Blog: http://www.kuciuk.blogspot.ro

http://www.librarium-haemus.blogspot.ro

"Libra që i rezistojnë shkulturimit" [AL]
An interview about books and literature in global conditions.

Tubim
[EN] Relationship between letters, paper and memory - and their impact on cinema. A short "semiotic" and quasi-biographical film in Albanian language. [EN] The word "Tubim" means Assembly, but it can also be read as Tubi im - My Tube (EN). The word "Rrëfilm" (made by the author) has at the same time the meaning of Confession, Storytelling, and Film. All Rights reserved.

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• Dacă există o voce on Dec. 30, 2021
  
  Este un manifest discret al tinereții lumii, ca stare și ca lume, ca mod de a privi, a se exprima, a asculta și a (nu) răspunde. Parcursul și dimensiunile acelui Tu căreia îi sunt încredințate scrisorile / mărturiile sunt transmise printr-un fel aparte de originalitate, izvorâtă poate din singurătatea superioară a Vocii.