Indignity: A Life Reimagined
Published September 2025
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?
Translations: German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Albanian, French, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil/Portugal), Swedish, Catalan, Slovenian, Turkish, Romanian, Czech, Greek, Mandarin (China/Taiwan), Croatian, Korean, Serbian, Polish.
Shortlisted, Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature
Finalist, Tadeusz Bradecki Prize for the best recent book that crosses artistic genres
Longlisted, Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction
Longlisted, The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
Published October 2021
Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope.
Then, in December 1990, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. There was no longer anything to fear from prying ears. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As one generation’s aspirations became another’s disillusionment, and as her own family’s secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant.
Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history.
Translations: German Suhrkamp, Greek Patakis, Italian Feltrinelli, French Le Seuil, Dutch De Bezige Bij, Spanish Anagrama, Polish Czarne, Albanian Dudaj, Danish Informations Forlag, Romanian Pandora, Turkish Yapi Kredi, Korean Open Books, Swedish Albert Bonniers, Norwegian Gyldendal, Chinese Mandarin (Taiwan China Times and China Post Wave), Icelandic Forlagid, Portuguese Todavia, Russian Eksmo, Finnish Atena, Hungarian Europa, Czech, Host, Japanese (Keiso Shobo), Bosnia (Buybook), Serbia (Geopoetika), Slovenia (Miladinska)
Winner, Ondaatje Prize from the Royal Society of Literature for the best work (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) in English evoking the spirit of a place (2022)
Winner, Lumo Skëndo Prize for the Best Work in Albanian Nonfiction (2022)
Winner, Slightly Foxed First Biography Award (2022)
Winner, Ridenhour Book Prize for Truth Telling (2024)
Finalist, The Baillie Gifford Prize for the best non-fiction book published in the English language (2021).
Finalist, Costa Prize for Memoir and Biography (2021)
Finalist, Gordon Burn Prize for the boldest and most innovative fiction and nonfiction
Longlisted, Central European Literary Award Angelus (best prose books from Central Europe)
The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Published October 2021
The Architectonic of Pure Reason, one of the most important sections of Kant’s first Critique, raises three fundamental questions. What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? Taken together these questions converge on a fourth one, which is at the centre of philosophy as a whole: what is the human being? This book suggests that the answer to this question is tied to a particular account of the unity of reason—one that stresses its purposive character. By focusing on the sources, evolution, and function of Kant’s concept of purposiveness, the book shows that the idea of purposiveness that Kant endorses in the Critique of Pure Reason is a concept of purposiveness as intelligent design, quite different from the concept of purposiveness as normativity that will become central to his later works. In the case of purposiveness as normativity, it is anchored to the concept of reflexive judgment, and grounded on transcendental freedom. Understanding this shift has important implications for some of the most difficult questions that confront the Kantian system: the passage from the system of nature to that of freedom, the relation between faith and knowledge, the philosophical defence of progress in history, and the role of religion. It is also crucial to shed light on the way in which Kant’s critique has shaped the successive German philosophical tradition.
Global Justice & Avant-Garde Political Agency
Published March 2017
Why should states matter and how do relations between fellow-citizens affect what is owed to distant strangers? How, if at all, can demanding egalitarian principles inform political action in the real world? This book proposes a novel solution through the concept of avant-garde political agency. Lea Ypi grounds egalitarian principles on claims arising from conflicts over the distribution of global positional goods, and illustrates the role of avant-garde agents in shaping these conflicts and promoting democratic political transformations in response to them. Against statists, she defends the global scope of equality, and derives remedial cosmopolitan principles from global responsibilities to relieve absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she shows that associative political relations play an essential role and that blanket condemnation of the state is unnecessary and ill-directed.
Advocating an approach to global justice whereby domestic avant-garde agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency offers a fresh and nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the contemporary debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi’s dialectical account illustrates how principles and agency can genuinely interact.
Italian translation: Stato e avanguardie cosmopolitiche , transl. Elisa Piras (Rome: Giusepppe Laterza, 2016).
Spanish translation: Justicia Global y Política de Vanguardia, transl. Martin Vivanco Lira (Mexico City: Biblioteca de Ética, Filosofía del Derecho y Política, Editorial Fontamar, 2015).
The Meaning of Partisanship
w/Jonathan White
Published October 2016
For a century at least, parties have been central to the study of politics. Yet their typical conceptual reduction to a network of power-seeking elites has left many to wonder why parties were ever thought crucial to democracy. This book seeks to retrieve a richer conception of partisanship, drawing on modern political thought and extending it in the light of contemporary democratic theory and practice. Looking beyond the party as organization, the book develops an original account of what it is to be a partisan. It examines the ideas, orientations, obligations, and practices constitutive of partisanship properly understood, and how these intersect with the core features of democratic life. Such an account serves to underline in distinctive fashion why democracy needs its partisans, and puts in relief some of the key trends of contemporary politics.
Finalist APSA’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for “The Meaning of Partisanship” as the best book on government, politics or international affairs published in 2016.
Migration in Legal and Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership
w/Sarah Fine
Published December 2016
This book presents seminal new work on the ethics of movement and membership. All the chapters contained in this volume address challenging and under-researched themes on the subject of migration. The chapters debate the question of the scope of the right to freedom of movement, whether we ought to recognize a human right to immigrate, and whether it might be legitimate to restrict emigration. They critically examine criteria for selecting between would-be immigrants, and for acquiring citizenship, as well as the tensions between the claims of prospective immigrants and existing residents. They tackle questions of migrant worker exploitation, and responsibility for refugees. All the chapters illustrate the importance of drawing on the tools of political theory to clarify, criticize, and challenge the current terms of the migration debate.
Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives
w/Katrin Flikschuh
Published November 2014
This is the first book dedicated to a systematic exploration of Kant’s position on colonialism. Bringing together a team of leading scholars in both the history of political thought and normative theory, the chapters in the volume seek to place Kant’s thoughts on colonialism in historical context, examine the tensions that the assessment of colonialism produces in Kant’s work, and evaluate the relevance of these reflections for current debates on global justice and the relation of Western political thinking to other parts of the world.
Vetëm për vete
Published 1997
Botuesi Çabej, Tirana
This book is a collection of short stories written in Albanian.
Lea Ypi 