Ece Temelkuran in conversation with Carole Cadwalladr

The Turkish writer and political thinker Ece Temelkuran joins investigative journalist and NERVE co-founder Carole Cadwalladr for an urgent and wide-ranging conversation on politics, belonging and resistance in an increasingly fractured world.

Temelkuran, the acclaimed author of How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism, will discuss her new book Nation of Strangers—a work described as “for anyone who feels alienated by an ever more monstrous world.” Blending political analysis with deeply personal reflection, the book takes the form of a series of letters written from one stranger to another, offering solidarity and clarity at a time when displacement, precarity and exclusion are becoming defining global experiences.

Across the world, the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and economically excluded continues to rise. Over the past decade, since leaving her own home country, Temelkuran has emerged as a powerful and often prophetic voice, warning that the rise of authoritarianism and fascism is not a distant threat, but a present and accelerating reality. As multiple crises converge—political repression, climate breakdown, and the erosion of democratic institutions—Nation of Strangers asks what it means to belong when the idea of home itself feels increasingly unstable.

Both poetic and precise, the book has been described by Brian Eno as “her most ambitious and dazzling book yet.” It argues that as more people are rendered strangers—by borders, by politics, by economics—new forms of connection and collective strength become not just possible, but essential.

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning writer, political thinker and public speaker whose work is published worldwide. Her novels Women Who Blow on Knots and The Time of Mute Swans have been translated into multiple languages and adapted for the stage. Now based in Berlin, she has lived and worked across Europe and the Middle East.

She is joined in conversation by Carole Cadwalladr, an investigative journalist, press freedom advocate and co-founder of The Nerve, a fearless, female-founded independent media title created by former Guardian and Observer journalists committed to holding power to account.