Allen Lane signs ‘dazzling’ new book by award-winning Ypi

Allen Lane has signed a “dazzling” new book by Lea Ypi, the Ondaatje Prize-winning author of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History.

Casiana Ionita, publishing director at Penguin Press, bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Indignity from Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency. Allen Lane will publish the book in hardback in the UK in spring 2025. Elsewhere, German rights have been sold to Suhrkamp, with additional offers in the US and Europe.

The synopsis reads: “When she came across a previously unseen photo of her grandmother circulating online, Lea Ypi started to question the stories she had been told as a child. This took her to the archives of the former secret police of communist Albania and the files they held on Leman Ypi.

“As she attempts to reconstruct her grandmother’s life through the unreliable fragments assembled by spies, as she reimagines the transformative events she experienced – from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the rise of communism – Ypi finds herself entangled in the riddles of interpretation: on what do we base our conceptions of the past? Out of the stories of our lives, whose perspective do we re-create? And does truth and truth alone preserve the dignity of a life?”

Ypi is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics. Her first trade book, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (also Allen Lane), was a Sunday Times bestseller and Waterstones book of the month, won the Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burns Prize. It is being translated into 27 languages.

Ypi said: “I am thrilled to be working with Allen Lane on a new book exploring the meaning of dignity, both personal and collective. Indignity is a reimagining and reinterpretation of my grandmother’s life, and an attempt to develop the moral ideas she embodies in Free. Balancing history, politics, literature and philosophy, my aim is to explore both how we can engage with a tragic past and what lessons to draw when it risks being repeated”.

Ionita said: “With Free, Lea Ypi established herself as an extraordinarily talented writer and brilliant thinker. In this new book she will again tell a universal story through a particular case – that of her grandmother, one of the most beloved characters in Free, who lived through the end of the Ottoman Empire and the making of a new nation state in interwar Europe. Indignity is a dazzling story, filled with fascinating people, a dark sense of humour and big ideas, that will, I believe, become a classic.”