MIU MIU LITERARY CLUB 2025
MILAN, APRIL 9th - 10th 2025

“A WOMAN’S EDUCATION”

Miu Miu introduces Literary Club, 2025 - “A Woman’s Education”. Under the direction of Miuccia Prada, now in its second iteration, the event this year explores the subjects of girlhood, love and sex education through the work of two international literary masters, French existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir, and Fumiko Enchi, the pen-name for Fumi Ueda, among the most prominent female authors of the Shöwa era in Japan. Conversations centred around these subjects challenge the rules taught to women for centuries, questioning their veracity and any preconceived ideas. Alongside, live music performances and prose and poetry readings bring together an enlightened community of cross-disciplinary talent, shedding new light on these historically revered names while enhancing Miu Miu’s commitment to the exploration and advancement of contemporary thought and culture.

A landmark title by each author is championed: opening with “The Power of Girlhood”, an in-depth exploration of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables. Written in 1954, but, deemed too intimate to publish in her lifetime, only released in 2020, the novella sparks renewed interest in a great feminist thinker. In this work, the writer of The Second Sex (1949) and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), charts the journey of a young girl into womanhood and the importance of female friendship in the process of self-determination. On the second day, with “About Love, Sex and Desire”, attention turns to Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years (1956), an explicit account of women’s sexuality, among the first published in her native country. The novel tells the story of Tomo, a woman married to a highly ranked politician, who is tasked with finding a concubine for her husband, thereby sacrificing her needs to a male authority figure. Both works embody the power of the written word as a creative medium through which women may express their most profound and provocative thoughts, in so doing, enriching the lives of other women in return.

Miu Miu Literary Club, “A Woman’s Education”, is conceived to further explore Miu Miu’s ongoing relationship with contemporary culture and with the voices of women in the arts.

In a series of panel conversations curated by Olga Campofreda – a writer and researcher of Italian culture, language and literature – ideas focusing on women’s position in society and contributors’ own experiences of growing up as women in disparate societies will be shared and opened up for conversation, all springing from the words of these extraordinary authors.

An esteemed panel of writers, speaking from both personal and professional perspectives, led conversations across both days. They included French-American Lauren Elkin, most recently author of Scaffolding and Art Monsters (2023), Flâneuse (2016), and translator of The Inseparables; Indian-born novelist and short story writer Geetanjali Shree, winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand; Italian novelist Veronica Raimo, author of Lost on Me (2023), shortlisted for the Premio Strega, Viareggio Rèpaci Prize, Diverse Book Awards, Mo Siewcharran Prize, and long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize; Nicola Dinan, who grew up in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur, and whose debut novel Bellies (2023) won the Polari First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards, a LAMBDA Literary Award, and Mo Siewcharran Prize; Irish writer Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times (2020), a Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and American poet and novelist Sarah Manguso, long-listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Wingate Literary Prize, and Mark Twain Award, and author of The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize.

Panels were moderated by writer and curator Lou Stoppard and spoken-word poet, model, and activist Kai Isaiah Jamal.

Following the conversations, similarly evocative poetry and readings took place on both days, along with live music performances.

Copies of both The Inseparables and The Waiting Years were available for the occasion.

Miu Miu Literary Club is the latest in a series of cultural experiences devised by Miu Miu to promote the arts. The inaugural Literary Club, Writing Life, which took place in April 2024, brought back into focus the work of Italian feminist authors Sibilla Aleramo and Alba De Céspedes. Further initiatives include Miu Miu Women’s Tales, the longest running commissioning platform of female-led short films and collaborations with female artists for fashion shows.

DAY 1 - April 9
Simone de Beauvoir: The Power of Girlhood
Introduction by Millie Brady
Panelists: Lauren Elkin, Geetanjali Shree, and Veronica Raimo
Moderator: Lou Stoppard

DAY 2 - April 10
Fumiko Enchi: About Love, Sex and Desire
Introduction by Cindy Bruna
Panelists: Nicola Dinan, Naoise Dolan, and Sarah Manguso
Moderator: Kai Isaiah Jamal

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908, in Paris into a bourgeois Catholic family. A gifted student, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, passing the agrégation exam in 1929 as its youngest candidate. That year, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, forming a lifelong, non-monogamous intellectual partnership. Her close friendship with Zaza Mabille, who died in 1929, deeply affected her and inspired her posthumously published novel The Inseparables (2020). De Beauvoir taught philosophy in the 1930s but was dismissed in 1941 under Nazi occupation. She became a defining feminist voice, challenging gender norms. De Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986, and was buried alongside Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery. De Beauvoir’s writings explored morality, agency, and social structures. The Second Sex (1949) revolutionized feminist thought. Notable novels include The Blood of Others (1945), All Men Are Mortal (1946), and The Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Goncourt.

Fumiko Enchi

Fumiko Enchi (1905–1986) was a Japanese writer and playwright known for her profound exploration of gender, sexuality, and the oppression of women in patriarchal society. Born in Tokyo as Fumi Ueda, she was heavily influenced by her father, a linguist, and her grandmother’s storytelling. Despite health struggles and being denied formal higher education, she pursued extensive private studies. Enchi began her career in theater but later transitioned to prose, gaining recognition in the 1950s. Her notable works, such as The Waiting Years (1957) and Masks (1958), often reinterpreted classical Japanese literature, particularly lady Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh-century narrative work The Tale of Genji, which she translated into modern Japanese. A pioneer in addressing female aging and sexuality, Enchi blended modern psychological insight and traditional cultural elements, such as the complex range of female masks used in Noh dramas, to portray unhappy women. Her contributions earned her Japan’s highest cultural honor, the Order of Culture, in 1985, as well as prestigious awards such as the Noma Literary Prize and the Women’s Literature Prize. Enchi remains a seminal feminist voice in Japanese literature today.