Fatos Arapi was an Albanian poet, novelist, translator and journalist. Arapi’s writings have been greatly appreciated by his readers and contemporaries, for which he has received various national and international awards.

He was born on July 19, 1930 in Zvërnec, near the city of Vlora, where he completed his primary and secondary education. He attended higher studies in Sofia, Bulgaria for economics, then returned to work in Tirana as a journalist and lecturer on modern Albanian literature. His first job was in 1953 in the State Plan Commission as the Head of the “Handicrafts and Local Industry” Branch. In 1954 he was transferred to the Financial Technical College as a teacher of that school (City of Students) where he taught the subjects: Statistics, Planning and Political Economy. He worked as a lecturer in Economics at the Agricultural Institute, and during the years 1959-1966 he was a lecturer in Political Economy at the Higher Economic Institute of Tirana.

In 1966, he was sent to circulation, in Vlora, where he worked as a teacher of the eight-year school “Ismail Qemali”, for about four years (March 1966 – August 1969). In 1971 he was appointed lecturer at the Faculty of History and Philology, University of Tirana. In 1973 (after the Fourth Plenum) he was sent to the night high school “Sami Frashëri”, Tirana, where he stayed for 10 years until 1983.

In 1962 and 1966 he published the volumes “Poetic Paths” and “Poems and Poems”. Criticized in 1973 for the volume Drama of an unnamed partisan, it remained almost silent for a long time until 1989.

In 2008, he won the “Golden Crown” in the poetic manifestation Evenings of Struga poetry and he is the first Albanian poet to have won this award.

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