Skopje, 24 August 2026 (MIA) -- Philosopher Lea Ypi is the winner of the 2026 BookStar award for her memoir "Free: Coming of Age at the End of History" (2021), which takes readers through a period of intense personal and political upheaval as she witnesses the collapse of communism, the rise of neoliberalism, and her own coming of age in post-communist Albania. 

Ypi will be given the prize Monday evening at a pre-festival event, titled titled "FREE AT LeAST?" and dedicated to the meaning of freedom, ahead of this year's BookStar European Literature Festival that will take place in September, organizers said.

The event will feature writers Ivana Trajanovska and Kalina Maleska speaking about the book. The conversation with Ypi will be in English and moderated by Maleska, who translated Ypi's memoir into Macedonian.

Earlier in the day, Ypi will speak with writer Dushko Krstevski in his "Naked Lunch" literary podcast produced by Antolog and BookStar.

"Previous winners of the BookStar award are Blazhe Minevski (Macedonia), Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Iceland), Najat El Hachmi (Spain), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), Miodrag Majić (Serbia), Niccolò Ammaniti (Italy), Eugene Vodolazkin (Russia), Slavenka Drakulić (Croatia), Jussi Adler-Olsen (Denmark) and Esmahan Aykol (Turkey/Germany)," organizers said.

Lea Ypi (b. 1979, Durrës, Albania) is a university professor and teaches political theory at the London School of Economics. She studied philosophy and literature at Sapienza University of Rome and received her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. 

Her academic interests include normative political theory, Enlightenment political thought (particularly Kant), Marxism, critical theory, nationalism, and the intellectual history of the Balkans, especially Albania. Recently, the British magazine Prospect named her one of the ten most important thinkers in the world.

She has published numerous academic papers in the field of political theory and she is the author of several academic books. She became widely known to a broader readership through her memoir "Free: Coming of Age at the End of History," which received the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize and was named Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Affairs and The Sunday Times.

This year's BookStar festival is scheduled for Sept. 28-30 in Skopje. mr/