Draft:Drita Çomo

Drita Çomo (Tirana, March 19, 1958 - February 19, 1981) was an Albanian poetess.

Biography:
She was born on March 19, 1958, in Tirana, the daughter of Maqo Çomo and Liri Belishova, figures with contributions to the National Liberation Movement, and after Liberation were appointed to high positions in the bureaucracy of communist Albania. Her parents were accused of espionage against the Party of Labor for the USSR. Her mother, Liri Belishova, one of the youth leaders during the Anti-Fascist War, was interned in Kuç near Vlora, then in Progonat, and finally in Çërrik along with Drita, who was only 2 years old at the time, and her father, Maqo Çomo, a partisan leader and later Minister of Agriculture, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In Çërrik, Drita completed high school, but due to progressive cancer, she did not take the matriculation exam. At the age of 23, she died in a hospital in Tirana.

In the final years of her life, she kept a diary, which was a record of events related to her stay in a place of isolation. She also left behind dozens of poems, written between 1975 and 1981, which tell a story of suffering, pain, and enchantment from her youth. A collection of her works was exhibited in Tirana on the twentieth anniversary of her death.

Publications

 * Light Emerging from the Abyss, Tirana: Onufri, 2014. With a preface by Ismail Kadare:

"On a cold day at the end of February, a cart was carrying to the cemetery a twenty-three-year-old poetess, a beautiful girl, one of those whom this people easily produced and equally easily destroyed. Behind the cart, on which the lifeless body of the young woman swayed, proceeded only her mother," thus Ismail Kadare introduces us to this book which collects the confessions of a restless soul. A soul that, although oppressed by the State and illness, maintained her refined demeanor in all circumstances. Drita Çomo, an Albanian poetess, lived under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Her family, considered "enemies of the people" by the regime, was harshly persecuted in communist dictatorship prisons and internment camps. Drita died on February 19, 1981, completely alone, in a bed at the Oncology Hospital in Tirana. She wrote her diary and poems for herself, unaware that one day they would be published. "