At the end of the 1970s, the Albanian poet Visar Zhiti sent a book of poems to the press expecting to publish his first book. But Zhiti ‘s poems had to go under strict control before being given permission to get printed. Not only did his poems not ‘pass’ the state propaganda hand, but according to the state, his poems contained ‘grave errors’; they were considered hermetic and against the format of socialist realism under the Albanian communist regime. For this reason, he was arrested in 1979 and sentenced to ten years in prison and served eight years. As the poet states, he continued to write even within the prison to keep his sanity under the regime’s dire circumstances.

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