Lea Ypi: Indignity

Join Lea Ypi - political theorist, memoirist and one of Europe’s most compelling contemporary thinkers - as she discusses her powerful new book, 'Indignity'.

A sweeping story that spans the twilight of the Ottoman Empire to the rise of communism in the Balkans, Indignity has been longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and named a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, Sunday Times, Prospect, TLS, Washington Post and NPR. An imaginative and searching exploration of historical injustice, dignity and truth, it is a family story at heart: when Ypi discovers a photograph of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941, despite being told that all records of her early life were destroyed, she begins a quest that unsettles everything she thought she knew.

Indignity:
Who was the real Leman Ypi? What compelled her to leave one world behind and marry into another at a time of war, political upheaval and ideological extremity? And what does it mean to judge the choices of those who lived through such eras?

Moving between archive and imagination, court records and secret police files, memory and speculation, Indignity reconstructs a vanished world while asking urgent questions about truth, survival and moral responsibility. By turns intimate and sweeping, it examines how private lives are shaped and sometimes distorted by the forces of history.

Lea Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the LSE and a Fellow of the British Academy. Born in Albania, she studied in Rome and Oxford, and is the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship. Her previous book, Free, won the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn Prize.

This event is part of our new Griffin Books After Hours series of talks, interviews and discussions, which will take place in our newly expanded shop.

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Friday 13 March | 7.30 pm
Griffin Books, 9A Windsor Road, Penarth, CF64 1JB*
Tickets: From £5.00
BOOK NOW: griffinbooksevents.co.uk