[Culture] Non-fiction Book Club: Nation of Strangers, by Ece Temelkuran

When
14/11/2026
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Registration

a) House Member Ticket - FREE
Available to House Members only.
b) Ideas Member Ticket
Available to Ideas Members only.
c) Non-Member Ticket – €15.00
Standard ticket.

Register

Full Circle NON-FICTION Book Club
hosted by ISABELLA GIURELLI

Nation of Strangers
by Ece Temelkuran

Culture | Sat 14th Nov | 4 - 5:30 pm

NEW! A regular non-fiction book club focused on how individuals and communities navigate, survive, and resist unjust systems.

*Doors open at 3.30pm. The book club begins at 4pm.

‘the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times' ― Michael Morpurgo

"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 an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and journalist. Her work appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, La Stampa, Der Spiegel and Le Monde Diplomatique 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. 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, both fiction and non-fiction, have been published and translated in several countries. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and Democracy Next.

In 2019, she published the internationally acclaimed nonfiction book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, about the rise of right-wing populism and how it operates. In 2021-2023 she was a fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg, working on a project "A New Vocabulary for 21st Century Progressives. In 2023, she received the El Mundo International Journalism Awards in the Freedom of the Press category for her body of work. Temelkuran was longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for Nation of Strangers.

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ADDITIONAL INFO