Freedom, inequality, indignity

Lea Ypi (Albania) grew up during the final years of a communist regime and the transition that followed its collapse. In Free, winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize, she reconstructs that childhood as a lived experience of political change, where authority shifts form and freedom is learned through its absence. Indignity extends this inquiry into family history and state archives, tracing her grandfather’s life under secret police surveillance and showing how public systems of power shape private memory; together, both books form a reflection on how lives are narrated across rupture, and what remains of freedom and dignity once it becomes history. In conversation with Oksana Forostyna.