Lea Ypi

Lea Ypi is an Albanian political philosopher and author born in 1979 in Gjirokastër, Albania. She studied in Rome and at the European University Institute in Florence, and is now Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (2012), a major work of academic political philosophy. Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (2021, Allen Lane) is her memoir, recounting her childhood in Albania during the final years of Enver Hoxha's communist regime and the traumatic transition to democracy and capitalism in the early 1990s — beginning with the fall of the Hoxha statue. Written with intellectual clarity and humour, the memoir demonstrates how the same events can be understood completely differently by those who lived through them. It won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2022 and numerous other awards. Ypi is a Fellow of the British Academy and writes widely on justice, freedom, and the left.