Educational Lea Ypi’s “darkly humorous and deeply severe” memoir, Free, which speaks “so resonantly to our lived second”, has gained the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize.
The award is given for books that “greatest evoke the spirit of a spot”. Free chronicles Ypi’s coming-of-age in Albania at a time when it was one of many final Stalinist outposts in Europe. In December 1990, statues of Stalin and Hoxha had been toppled, and life modified in a single day for folks, who had been now in a position to vote freely, put on what they appreciated and worship as they wished.
However the change additionally noticed jobs disappear and predatory pyramid schemes result in the nation being bankrupted, leading to violent battle. As her family’s secrets and techniques had been revealed, Ypi discovered herself questioning what freedom actually meant.
Chairing the judging panel was poet Sandeep Parmar, joined by YA creator Patrice Lawrence and author and lawyer Philippe Sands.
They mentioned of Free: “Studying and rereading Lea Ypi’s Free we felt very strongly that the e book’s central issues – politics, private historical past, the very that means of freedom – spoke so resonantly to our lived second.”
The judges described Ypi as “a grasp” of juxtaposing grand and private narratives. In addition they praised the best way her “darkly humorous and deeply severe work” made them “mirror forcefully on the necessity for truthfulness concerning the tales we're advised and the way we negotiate our personal lives inside them.”
Ypi, who has been awarded £10,000 in prize cash, is a professor of political idea on the London Faculty of Economics and Political Science and adjunct professor in philosophy on the Australian Nationwide College. She was introduced because the winner by RSL president emeritus Colin Thubron on behalf of the prize founder and funder, Sir Christopher Ondaatje, at an occasion at Two Temple Place in London.
Free was chosen because the winner from a shortlist of six books. The others in rivalry had been The Manningtree Witches by AK Blakemore, Islands of Abandonment: Life within the Put up-Human Panorama by Cal Flyn, Writing the Camp by Yousif M Qasmiyeh, Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera and The Island of Lacking Bushes by Elif Shafak.
The prize was gained in 2021 by Ruth Gilligan’s thriller The Butchers. Earlier winners embrace former MP Alan Johnson for his memoir This Boy, and Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam for her account of her grandmother’s life story, The Spouse’s Story.
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