The Circolo Filologico Milanese is a language school with a reading room older than most of its catalogue. Miu Miu has taken the building for three days and filled it with women who write, think, argue. The fourth edition of the Literary Club runs from 22 to 24 April, under Miuccia Prada's direction, and its stated subject is the politics of desire.
The room is panelled in dark wood. Yellow chairs have been brought in for the occasion, set in a loose oval. A long table of books runs the length of one wall. These are the Curated Library titles, selected by the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti. Women writing through the texture of their own thinking. A room for listening rather than announcing.
The voices
Lou Stoppard and Nadia Beard moderate. The speakers arrive in morning waves. Megan Nolan, the Irish novelist. Lea Melandri, the Italian feminist who began publishing in the 1970s. Annabelle Hirsch, writing from Berlin on the history of objects. Jennifer Guerra, Wayetu Moore, Francesca Marciano, Gloria Wekker, Elisa Cuter. The programme runs long. Each voice is given time.
Two writers anchor the weekend. Annie Ernaux, whose memoir A Girl's Story traces a teenage summer and the years spent looking back at it. Ama Ata Aidoo, the Ghanaian poet and former Secretary for Education, read alongside her. The pairing sets a Nobel laureate beside a voice from a different continent and political formation, and asks them to share the same room.
Desire after AI
Professor Olga Gorinunova gives a lecture titled Desire After AI. Her argument turns on what happens when language models begin to generate the vocabulary of wanting. Desire becomes something closer to logical inference. A prediction based on data.
Katherine Angel, the writer and psychotherapist, follows with a talk on consent. She opens the space between yes and no, the silences and reservations that the post-MeToo script does not describe. The two lectures read as paired: one about what machines may know of appetite, the other about what remains irreducible in the human version of it.
We need a new political vocabulary and tools to deal with this new situation.
Isabelle RoweMiuccia's hand
Miuccia Prada has run Miu Miu as a thinking house. The Literary Club began in 2024 and travelled to Shanghai in 2025. This third Milan iteration arrives during Salone del Mobile, the week in which the city carries the largest volume of design and ideas in a calendar year. To place a three-day seminar on feminist literature inside that week is a choice about where the brand wants its name to sit.
The room does not display clothes. No mannequins, no racks. A few of the speakers wear Miu Miu. Most do not. The argument is made by association. A house that cares about what women write, what they read, who decides what they are permitted to want.
Megan Nolan, Annabelle Hirsch and Lea Melandri on day one at Circolo Filologico Milanese. Courtesy Miu Miu, via Wallpaper*
The reading room
Braidotti's Curated Library is the quieter half of the programme. A public reading room, open across the three days, stocked with printed matter rather than the event's signage. Diaries, essays, short fiction. The idea is that writing has given women a vocabulary for their own desires when the surrounding political vocabulary has often not.
Milanese students pass through between sessions. Visitors to Salone detour in from the surrounding streets. The yellow chairs fill up, empty, fill again. On the final afternoon the programme closes with poetry and live music. The book table stays. The questions stay. The rest of Milan Design Week continues outside the door.