Luan Starova

Luan Arif Starova (Macedonian: Луан Ариф Старова; born 1941) is an Albanian writer who lives in Macedonia. He has published his works both in Albanian and in Macedonian; he is said to usually first write his texts in Macedonian, and later translate them into Albanian.

Luan Starova was born in Pogradec, an Albanian town on Lake Ohrid, in 1941. His family had legal and scholarly background: his grandfather on the father's side had served as an Ottoman judge (qadi) in Prilep, before retiring and emigrating to Turkey; his father earned a law degree in Istanbul, and was a lawyer and a scholar.

In 1943, when Luan was a small child, his family fled the Italy-occupied Albania to (also occupied) Macedonia. They first settled in Struga, at the opposite end of Lake Ohrid from Pogradec, and later moved to Skopje.

He grew up in Tito's Yugoslavia, and studied French language and literature at Skopje University (1960–1967). After graduation, he worked as a journalist, becoming in 1968 the editor of Albanian programming on Television Skopje. However, in the same year he left for Zagreb to start his postgraduate studies Zagreb University. He earned a master's degree with a thesis on The Balkans in the Prose of Guillaume Apollinaire. When working for his doctoral degree in French and comparative literature (awarded 1978), he spent some time at Sorbonne, collecting materials on the collaboration of Apollinaire and the Albanian scholar and writer Faik Konica. Later, he was to edit a book about these two writers.

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