Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker, and public speaker whose work has been published worldwide. Her novels, Women Who Blow on Knots and The Time of Mute Swans, have been published in several languages and adapted to the stage. Temelkuran’s two political essays, Deep Mountain: Across the Armenian–Turkish Divide and Turkey: The Insane and Melancholy, explore the connection between the personal and political. After she left her country in 2016, Temelkuran began writing in English. Her first book in this language, How to Lose a Country, received international praise. Her second, Together, offers “a way out from the political and moral insanity” that is ushered by the global rise of fascism. Temelkuran has lived in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris, and Zagreb. She is currently based in Berlin and is on the advisory board of Progressive International and DemocracyNext.
“There is such vital, intimate depth to Nation of Strangers, one of the finest books I’ve ever read on what it means to be cast out, to be unhomed. Ece Temelkuran is a brilliant thinker, and her work here is as conceptually illuminating as it is beautifully written.” –Omar El Akkad
Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?
Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those convinced it couldn’t happen in their country that fascism is coming.
Now, as oppression spreads and temperatures rise—as we face competing crises and learn, again and again, that no institution is so concrete it can’t turn to dust, and no home is too strong to be destroyed—she has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another.
Politically attuned and deeply personal, this extraordinary, heartening correspondence is a gift to treasure in uncertain times. As poetic as it is precise, it is a book for anyone who feels alienated by an ever-more monstrous world. It shows how, as we all become strangers, our home will depend on the strength we find with one another.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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