He was born and raised in Elbasan and studied at the Qemal Stafa High School, in Tirana, Albania. Afterwards he studied mathematics in China during the tense years of the Sino-Albanian alliance. Kongoli chose not to publish any major works during the dictatorship. Rather than this, he devoted his creative energies at the time to an obscure and apolitical career as a mathematician, and waited for the storm to pass. His narrative talent and individual style only really emerged, at any rate, in the 1990s, since the fall of the communist dictatorship.