Lea Ypi, a politics professor at the London School of Economics, wanted to write a thoughtful book about concepts of freedom. She succeeded, quite brilliantly, although by means other than she had ...

The Albanian academic describes coming of age at a turning point in history, and the family secrets exposed in its aftermath One wet afternoon in December 1990, little Lea Ypi ran across Tirana to the ...

What exactly does it mean to be free? “Freedom” was the mantra of the Cold War, at least on the Western side of the Iron Curtain. In the American mind, it is most often associated with the freedoms ...

Until December 1990, when widespread protests toppled a one-party state and ushered in a turbulent democracy, there was no place on Earth more adamantly Stalinist than Albania. A mountainous land to ...

David talks with Lea Ypi about her new memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, which tells the story of her childhood in Stalinist Albania and what came after. It’s a tale of family secrets, ...

A tale of family secrets and political awakening amid a crumbling regime, the LSE professor’s memoir is one of the nonfiction titles of the year In 1990 Lea Ypi was asked to write a school essay. The ...

A child’s sense of safety, security, and national pride is upended as family histories surface and a political system splinters in this beautiful debut from Guardian contributor Ypi. The author, who ...

Award given for books that evoke the spirit of place goes to work that chronicles the author’s coming-of-age in Albania during the fall of communism Academic Lea Ypi’s “darkly humorous and deeply ...

Girls in Pioneers uniforms walk down the Boulevard of the Heroes of the People in Tirana, Albania’s capital, in 1987. A portrait of the late leader Enver Hoxha adorns a university building in the ...

Enver Hoxha’s communist Albania was the “last Stalinist outpost of the 20th century”, said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times. In Free, her often “astonishing” memoir, Lea Ypi brings to life what it ...