Indignity: A Life Reimagined - Lea Ypi in conversation - Gower St

Join us as we welcome Lea Ypi to the shop to discuss Indignity: A Life Reimagined. An imaginative investigation into dignity and historical injustice through the story of a family from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the dawn of Communism in the Balkans. Longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-FictionNamed a Book of the Year by Financial Times, Sunday Times, Prospect, TLS, Washington Post, NPR. 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? Lea Ypi holds the Ralph Miliband Chair in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Indignity: A Life Reimagined was longlisted for the Women's Prize and shortlisted for Blackwell's Book of the Year. Her work is translated into over thirty languages.