Kadare, whose father was a post office employee, attended the University of Tiranë. He later went to Moscow to study at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. Upon returning to Albania in 1960, he worked as a journalist and then embarked on a literary career. He endured periods of controversy in his native country during the long rule of Enver Hoxha (Hoxha, Enver), whose dictatorial government Kadare alternately praised and criticized. In 1990, feeling threatened by the government and fearing arrest, Kadare defected to France.

Kadare first attracted attention in Albania as a poet, but it was his prose works that brought him worldwide fame. Gjenerali i ushtrisë së vdekur (1963; The General of the Dead Army), his best-known novel, was his first to achieve an international audience. It tells the story of an Italian general on a grim mission to find and return to Italy the remains of his country's soldiers who died in Albania during World War II. Among Kadare's other novels dealing with Albanian history is Kështjella (1970; The Castle), a recounting of the armed resistance of the Albanian people against the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century. The same theme of resistance, but in a political context, recurs in Dimri i madh (1977; “The Great Winter”), which depicts the events that produced the break between Albania and the Soviet Union in 1961.

The novel Ura me tri harqe (1978; The Three-Arched Bridge), set in medieval Albania, received wide critical acclaim. Kadare's subsequent works of fiction include Nëpunësi i pallatit të ëndrrave (1981; The Palace of Dreams), Dosja H. (1990; The File on H.), and Piramida (1995; The Pyramid). Tri këngë zie për kosovën (1999; Three Elegies for Kosovo, or Elegy for Kosovo) comprises three stories about a 14th-century battle between Balkan leaders and the Ottoman Empire. Lulet e ftohta të marsit (2000; Spring Flowers, Spring Frost) tells the story of a painter in postcommunist Albania, and Pasardhësi (2003; The Successor) examines the fate of one of Hoxha's presumed successors.

Among Kadare's nonfiction volumes are Kronikë në gur (1971; Chronicle in Stone), a work which is as much about his childhood in wartime Albania as about the town of Gjirokastër itself, and Eskili, ky humbës i madh (1988; “Aeschylus, This Great Loser”), which examines the affinity between Albanian and Greek cultures from antiquity to modern times. Nga një dhjetor në tjetrin (1991; “From One December to Another”; Eng. trans. Albanian Spring: The Anatomy of Tyranny) expresses his views on Albanian politics and government between 1944 and 1990.

The themes of Kadare's works, which are often semiautobiographical, include Albanian history, politics, and folklore, blood-feud tradition, and ethnicity. His fiction has elements of romanticism, realism, and surrealism. He has been likened to the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Yevtushenko, Yevgeny) for dissenting from state-imposed guidelines for literature and to the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (García Márquez, Gabriel), in part because of their common interest in the grotesque and the surreal. Kadare was granted membership in the French Academy in 1996 and was later made an officer of the French Legion of Honour. In 2005 he became the first winner of the Man Booker International Prize.