Acclaimed Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare -- an eternal bridesmaid for a Nobel literature prize -- died Monday of a heart attack aged 88, his editor and a Tirana hospital told AFP.

Doctors tried to revive the writer when he was brought to the hospital with "no signs of life", but he was declared dead at 8:40 am (0640 GMT) local time, the hospital said.

Editor and publisher Bujar Hudhri confirmed his death.

Through the epic sweep of novels like "Broken April" and "The General of the Dead Army", he used metaphor and quiet sarcasm to chronicle the grotesque fate of his country and its people under the paranoid communist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Despite being branded a traitor by Albania's communist leaders when he defected to France in 1990, Kadare was accused by some of enjoying a privileged position under Hoxha, who cut the Balkan country off from the rest of the world.

It was an accusation he dismissed with withering irony.

"Against whom was Enver Hoxha protecting me? Against Enver Hoxha?" Kadare told AFP in 2016.

"The hell of communism, like every other hell, was smothering in the worst sense of the term," Kadare told AFP in one of his last interviews in October.

"But literature transformed that into a life force, a force which helped you survive and hold your head up and win out over dictatorship.

"Which is why I am so grateful for literature, because it gives me the chance to overcome the impossible," said the writer, who despite being visibly frail, was still working.