One of the most hotly anticipated of Salone del Mobile’s host of erudite, brand-backed events will be taking place between Wednesday 22 April – Friday 24 April, 2026, in the form of the Miu Miu Literary Club. The fourth iteration of this bookish salon takes as its theme the ‘Politics of Desire’ and will invite audiences to engage in the subject through a series of conversations, lectures, and a public reading room with a curated selection of printed matter.
This is the third occasion that Miu Miu has brought the club – which draws from the tradition of literary circles and artistic collective – to Milan’s Circolo Filologico Milanese, an institution dedicated, appropriately, to language (another Miu Miu Literary Club was held in Shanghai in 2025). This spring’s event will examine its theme in part through the writing of two internationally renowned authors, Annie Ernaux and the late Ama Ata Aidoo, via conversations with contemporary writers, moderated by Lou Stoppard and Nadia Beard. The line-up of speakers includes Megan Nolan, Lea Melandri, Annabelle Hirsch, Jennifer Guerra, Wayetu Moore, Francesca Marciano, Gloria Wekker, and Elisa Cuter.
Miu Miu Literary Club at Milan Design Week 2026
The three-day event also features two lectures: Professor Olga Gorinunova, a cultural theorist working with technological cultures, media philosophy and aesthetics, will present a talk titled ‘Desire After AI’, which will examine desire’s roots before sexuality, and the ways it is being re-oriented towards abstractions produced by artificial intelligence. ‘We find ourselves in a situation when what we are supposed to desire is a logical inference, a prediction based on data,’ Gorinunova tells Wallpaper*. ‘Personalisation, recommendation systems and profiling all work on this basis. They guide us to things we supposedly want, tell us the “truth” about ourselves, but these truths are produced by computation.’
Following that, ’How do we talk about consent?’ is the title of literary non-fiction writer and psychotherapist Katherine Angel’s lecture, a continuation of issues raised in her 2021 book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. ‘Post-#MeToo, there was a vital reassertion of the importance of consent. But I felt worried about rhetoric that places a burden on women to assert themselves sexually, as a way to keep themselves safe,’ Angel details to Wallpaper*. ‘In my lecture, I talk about the messy space between “yes” and “no” that we all have to negotiate, and about the importance of thinking about pleasure, joy, discovery, curiosity – rather than thinking about consent as the only measure of sexual ethics.’
Megan Nolan, Annabelle Hirsch and Lea Melandri on day one of Miu Miu Literary Club 2026
Miu Miu Literary Club has been a space for rigorous conversation around feminist issues, through a literary lens, since its inception in 2024. Previous editions of the symposium have centred on women’s education and writing as a creative medium, and the format is usually dedicated to the oeuvres of selected writers – the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Sibilla Aleramo, Alba De Céspedes, Fumiko Enchi, and Eileen Chang have all served as entry points to past events. Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux and writer, poet, and former Secretary for Education in Ghana Ama Ata Aidoo will form the basis of this week’s discussions.
‘Annie Ernaux’s frank and unflinching accounts of ordinary – but momentous – experiences are so resonant and powerful, for so many readers of a wide span of generations, which I always find interesting,’ says Angel. ‘And Ama Ata Aidoo’s poems are so pithy and reverberating. Whom Do We Thank For Women’s Conferences? is wonderful – “We were / only ourselves; each alone as when we were born, and / shall be, when we died”. I mean! What a line!’
On the prescience of the theme, Gorinunova tells Wallpaper* that: ‘We need a new political vocabulary and tools to deal with this new situation. Desire is not necessarily “good”. People can find themselves in frameworks where what they desire is incompatible with who they are, and their desire can undo them.’ Angel continues, ‘I think conversations about the relationship between politics and the intimate, between culture and the complex textures of our inner worlds, are so important. I think they need to be everywhere! But of course we are all beset by the quandaries of the moment we’re in, which involves a paradoxical surplus of discourse about supremely pressing political questions, and a simultaneous failure of that discourse to have traction. In some ways, it’s easier than ever for discourse to circulate, but in other ways, change seems harder than ever.’
Miu Miu Literary Club runs until Friday 24 April, 2026. Register at miumiu.com.