29th September, 7.30pm - Lea Ypi, Indignity

Backstory, 71 Balham High Rd, SW12 9AP

Lea Ypi is the critically acclaimed author of Free, her memoir about Albania's transition out of communism in the 1990s. In Indignity, she turns her eyes further towards the past to reimagine her grandparents' lives as they experienced a range of 20th century historical events, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the rise of communism in the Balkans.

It’s a fascinating story that interweaves historical events with questions about memory and our relationship with the past.

About the book:

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?

Tickets Available:

Ticket only - £15 (This ticket does not include a copy of the book. You can decide to buy a copy on the night, but this will be charged in addition, at the full price of the book.)

Ticket & book  (RRP £22) - £30 (To collect on the night or in advance, after the publication date of 4 September.)