Nacional Publications and the Triumph of the Novel “The Brides of the Blue Villa” at the 2025 Book Fair
FLAMUR Bucpapaj
TPlani shpk is one of the owning companies of the TPlani Hydropower Plant and has never withdrawn from its activity. This truth must be stated clearly.
This year’s Book Fair revealed an unmistakable reality: the Albanian public can no longer be misled by inflated names, table-made awards, or the closed literary circles that have dominated culture for decades. The major success of Nacional Publications and the novel “The Brides of the Blue Villa” proved the power of the reader, who chose authenticity and quality over ideological fiction and inherited favoritism.
With thousands of copies sold, “The Brides of the Blue Villa” became the most sought-after book at the fair. While certain authors continue to write for each other, praise each other, and distribute prizes within their own small networks, the fair revealed the truth: many of them failed. Some sold almost nothing; others did not sell a single copy.
The readers were not fooled.
The legacy of Albania’s fabricated cultural system
For decades, the Party of Labour and the State Security constructed a completely falsified cultural environment. Writers were not free creators; they were tools of ideological education, economically privileged and politically selected. None of them faced a free market.
The system gifted them everything: publications, awards, travel, prestige.
Thirty-five years after so-called “pluralism”, the bitter truth remains:
most institutions are still controlled by the same old networks—linked to the former Political Bureau, State Security structures, patronage networks, and well-known regional clans. Albania has been divided, controlled, and ruled by an unchanged territorial triangle: Vlora–Tepelena–Gjirokastër, which has filled the administration, culture, tenders, public posts, and all decision-making spaces.
Pluralism never arrived.
Democracy was never built.
The state remained the property of clans.
And the cultural sphere is no exception.
Nepotistic awards and the essential question: who knows these writers?
This year again, the top award of the fair was handed to a “philosophy lecturer” in a laughable manner—without merit, without impact, without readership—simply to preserve internal balances within the same circles.
But today’s reader asks real questions:
— In which European bookstores are their books found?
— In which American catalogs do they exist?
— Who knows them outside the offices of Tirana?
The answer is simple: no one.
Meanwhile, my novels—translated into English, French, Italian and Turkish—are present in American and European bookstores. This is not a coincidence. It is merit, work, and recognition in real marke
Organized attacks—and their inevitable failure
In recent years, certain individuals, pretending to be “environmental activists,” but in fact acting with the same tactics once used by State Security, launched attacks against me, as seen in the infamous Valbona case. Under the mask of “protection”, they targeted the company TPlani shpk, spreading lies for years regarding a small, existing hydropower project.
Today, the facts speak for themselves:
TPlani shpk is still there.
It never left.
It is one of the owning companies of the TPlani HPP and continues its activity legally.
And those who fought against it?
They failed.
Just as all who come from the same ideological lineage of the former regime have failed.
Some of them pretend to be “activists” while their private lives are in complete moral collapse.
Even the former Minister of Culture, manipulated by dark forces who are today in prison, attempted an attack against Nacional Publications. Today she faces legal consequences and SPAK investigations for her abuses and slander.
Nacional is not the Albania of 1945
We are not like the nationalists who were extinguished in 1945.
We do not kneel.
We do not retreat.
We do not remain silent.
We answer every lie.
Every pressure.
Every clan.
And we answer with the strongest weapon: our work, our readers, and real success.
The triumph of “The Brides of the Blue Villa” shows one very important truth:
The Albanian reader is waking up.
They want real literature, real stories, real authors—not products of ideological factories.
The public spoke loudly.
And this time—the message was unmistakable.
Nacional Publications won.
Free literature won.
