Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Nonfiction

From the internationally acclaimed Turkish author of How To Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism: A personal exploration of exile and a galvanizing new vision of home.

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.

About the author

Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known novelists and political commentators. Her work appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel among other prominent international media outlets.

During her twenty-year career as a journalist, and before she lost her job due to political oppression, she was twice recognized as Turkey’s most read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media. Originally educated as a lawyer, she gave the Freedom Lecture as a guest of Amnesty International and Prince Claus Foundation. She has also given speeches at Oxford, London School of Economics, Harvard University, MIT, Columbia University, Stanford University and the House of Commons in the UK. More recently she has appeared on the BBC’s Imagining the New Truth series and BBC$s Hard Talk.

She has lived in Lebanon, Tunisia and France, and was a visiting fellow at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Her books have been published in nineteen countries. Her most recent novels are Women Who Blow on Knots - publishers include Parthian Books (UK), Hoffmann und Campe (Germany), Editions Jean-Claude Lattes (France), Spider & Fish (Italy) and Rod & Co (Denmark) - and The Time of Mute Swans - publishers include Skyhorse Publishing (US), Hoffmann und Campe (Germany) and Rod & Co (Denmark). Women Who Blow on Knots has received the PEN Award (2016) and Edinburgh Literature Festival Award (2017).

Ece also wrote a non-fiction book titled Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy - publishers include Zed Books (UK), Hoffmann und Campe (Germany), Horizon Books (China), Walkers Cultural Enterprise (Taiwan), Ksiazkowe Klimaty (Poland) and Corint (Romania). Ece Temelkuran has been granted “The Ambassador of New Europe” for Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy.

4th Estate will publish Ece Temelkuran’s new book, How to Lose a Country: The Seven Warning Signs of Rising Populism, which dissects the global rise of populism and the downfall of democracy, in the UK on 7th February 2019. It will also be published in France (Stock), Germany (Hoffman and Campe), Holland (Ambo Anthos), Italy (Bollati Borringhieri), Portugal (Temas e Debates) and Spain