Albana Shala belongs to the generation of Albanian poets who were brought up under Stalinist rule. Emotionally wounded, she left Albania in the early 90s, but was never able to cut the bond with her country, its past and its people.

For her poetry debut The Digital Pope / Papa Dixhital she received the MiGJENI Award of the Albanian Ministry of Culture (2008). The collection was published in Dutch by Uitgeverij P as De Digitale Paus.

Her second poetry collection, Paradise is Orange, appeared in 2011. Her collection of short stories Cargo of a child was published in 2013, followed by the non fiction book Ten Conversations with Albanians in 2017.

The author invites the reader to a journey into her Albania, populated by characters interconnected in their struggle to survive and find sense when experiencing pain from the violence and dehumanising nature of the dictatorship. Her characters also breathe joy, pleasure, humor and compassion. She gives voice to those who could not speak, finding poetry in the tender ways they relate and pointing to how dignity can be recovered in the process of remembering and settling with the past.  

The Consequences of Love / Pasojat e Dashurisë will be published in Albanian and English in September 2021. It will offer a taste of contemporary Albanian poetry from the diaspora. Love becomes the binding force beyond the constraints of time and space.

The Consequences of Love is a book about desire, pain, expectations, loneliness, denial, rejection and resistance, versed by a feminist poet who attempts to connect and reconcile all what should be reinvented in the 21st century.