Nation of Strangers: On rebuilding Home with Ece Temelkuran & Nicola Sturgeon

In a culture so often devoid of nuance and stripped of hope, Ece Temelkuran's work is a reliable antidote - her writing shrewd, prescient and beautifully crafted.

In a highlight event of spring, we're thrilled to welcome back the internationally acclaimed author and political thinker for a launch of her latest book! A powerful and consoling reappraisal of the concept of exile, migration and home, Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21 st Century is one of our most anticipated books of 2026.

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.

Since leaving her home a decade ago, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those who thought 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, Ece has written Nation of Strangers, a series of letters from one stranger to another.

Politically attuned and deeply personal, this powerful and poetic book offers consolation in uncertain times, showing that as we all become strangers, our home will be the strength we find in one another.

It's a privilege to welcome Ece back to Edinburgh, this time for a launch hosted by Nicola Sturgeon.

‘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. More than simply an account of the global currents sweeping more and more of us into a state of what some might call exile, this is a profoundly personal meditation. In this time of rampant fascism, as a previous era’s definition of home grows ever more distant, Nation of Strangers is both a call and a comfort, a book that made me feel so much less alone’ - OMAR EL AKKAD

OUR SPEAKER

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.