IN CONVERSATION: LEDIA XHOGA
24/11/2025 (Monday)
18:00h
Reporting House (Skenderbeg Square)
Moderated by Doruntina Vinca
For the next event of our ‘In Conversation’ series, we are delighted to welcome acclaimed Albanian-American author Ledia Xhoga to Prishtina! Xhoga will be joined by writer and translator Doruntina Vinca in a conversation about the Xhoga’s Debut novel Misinterpretation, which was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.
In present-day New York City, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions. Despite her husband’s cautions, she soon becomes entangled in her clients’ struggles: Alfred’s nightmares stir up her own buried memories, and an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan. As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardizing the nameless narrator’s marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not. Ruminative and propulsive, Ledia Xhoga’s debut
novel Misinterpretation interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation.
It explores the way that language is kept in our bodies, how it can reveal truths we aren’t ready to hear. Misinterpretation subtly blurs the distinction between help and harm. We found it propulsive, unsettling, and strangely human.
—Booker Prize 2025 judges
A nuanced exploration of communication failures, blurred boundaries and the emotional cost of unchecked altruism.
—Observer
A gorgeously written book that combines humor and suspense….. It was taut but still left subtle moments for brilliant characterization to shine through.
—Debutiful, A Best Debut of 2024
An unnamed Albanian interpreter becomes enmeshed in the life of one of her clients, a Kosovar torture survivor, and reality begins to shift and blur.
—Lit Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of 2024
Ledia Xhoga is a fiction writer and playwright. She was born and raised in Tirana, Albania, and currently lives in Brooklyn and Catskills. Her debut novel Misinterpretation was published by Tin House Books (US & Canada) and Daunt Books (UK). Misinterpretation was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the recipient of a New York City Book Award, Finalist for Center For Fiction First Novel Prize and a Best of 2024 Book by Debutiful. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Brooklyn Rail, Large Hearted Boy, Intrepid Times, Hobart and other journals.
Doruntina Vinca is a writer, researcher, and translator from Prishtina, based in Tirana. Her practice moves between language, feminist literature, and the text as a tool for exploring new forms of collectivity and knowledge-sharing. She is the co-founder of the reading group Radical Sense and the editor of two volumes of feminist texts translated and published in Albanian.