We're thrilled to welcome Lea Ypi (author of the bestselling memoir Free) to discuss Indignity: A Life Reimagined, her imaginative investigation into historical injustice, dignity and truth.

Free & open to all. Places limited. Arrive early to avoid disappointment. Most events take place on our first floor, which is accessible by stairs. If you have any concerns about access, please don't hesitate to contact us.

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.

What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and marry a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?

By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi’s memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination, fact and fiction. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations?

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Lea Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the LSE and a fellow of the British Academy. A native of Albania, she studied Philosophy and then Literature at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and was a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is the recipient of many prizes, including the Philip Leverhulme Prize for exceptional research achievement and the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in Political Science. Her last book, Free, was awarded the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2022, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the Costa Biography Award 2021, and the Gordon Burn Prize 2022, and has been sold in more than 30 languages. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and Financial Times. Her most recent book, Indignity, is published by Allen Lane in the UK, and is forthcoming with Calmann Levy in France.