Lea Ypi.
LEA YPI
FREE: COMING OF AGE AT THE END OF HISTORY (2022)
Sunday Times best seller.
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.
Winner of Hatchards & Biographers’ Club First Biography Prize.
Lea Ypi gives an intimate account of her family’s upheaval during the collapse of the communist regime in Albania in 1990. There was widespread relief at the ending of a harsh regime with constant surveillance by secret police, political executions, and food shortages. After December 1990 these restrictions were swept away, but they were replaced by widespread unemployment, and millions being bankrupted by Ponzi schemes. Many tried to flee to Italy, but were turned back. And all this created fierce tensions between the idealist young and the elderly who lhankered for the stability of the old order.
Luke Harding, writing in the Observer, described the book thus: ‘Riveting. . A wonderfully funny and poignant portrait of a small nation in a state of collapse. . . gloriously readable. . . One of the nonfiction titles of the year, it is destined for literary accolades and popular success.’
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Lea Ypi, who was born in Albania in 1975, is a professor political theory at the London School of Economics. Her great grandfather was briefly Prime Minister of Albania in the 1920s. His son, Ypi’s grandfather, was imprisoned for fifteen years by by the communist Albanian government. Before joining the London School of Economics she was a post-doctoral research fellfow at Nuffield College, Oxford.
