Nation of Strangers

‘Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?’

We welcome internationally acclaimed author and political thinker Ece Temelkuran to Norwich, the City of Sanctuary, to discuss her prescient new book, Nation of Strangers.

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 of Türkiye, 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.

‘Nation of Strangers is perhaps the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times.’ Michael Morpurgo

‘Crackling with intelligence, insight and generosity’ Kamila Shamsie

Ece Temelkuran’s novels Women Who Blow on Knots and The Time of Mute Swans have been translated into several languages and adapted for the stage. Her political essays, including Deep Mountain and Turkey: The Insane and Melancholy, examine the ties between the personal and political. Since leaving Turkey in 2016, she has written in English, earning international acclaim with How to Lose a Country and Together. She has lived across the Middle East and Europe and is now based in Berlin, serving on the advisory boards of Progressive International and DemocracyNext.

Nation of Strangers has been longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.