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One summer’s evening in 2022, the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran found herself in a doctor’s office in Hamburg, Germany, lying flat on a stretcher with an IV drip in her arm. After six intense years of work and travel, her body was in revolt. “I now know that I need to talk,” she writes in her latest book, Nation of Strangers, which was shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s prize for nonfiction. “I fear that not speaking will make me really sick. And when homeless, you cannot afford to get sick.”
In fact, she had not been silent in the preceding years: she had published two well-received books, How To Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism (2019) and Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World (2021). She had spoken her warnings in public, too, on stages all across the west, saying: this is what happened to us in Turkey – make sure it doesn’t happen to you, too. And she is not technically homeless; she lives in Berlin. But by “speaking” and by “home”, Temelkuran means something specific yet vast. Nation of Strangers posits that the idea of home, and the emotions that idea contains, is one of the dominant political forces of our time.
Temelkuran became a journalist at 19, while still in the thick of a law degree; she was a senior reporter for CNN Türk and then a political columnist critical of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. She has also published several novels and prose poems. For years, she operated successfully in the bruising milieu of male-dominated newsrooms, in a patriarchal, increasingly nationalistic culture. But as Erdoğan tightened his grip, life became increasingly difficult: death threats, rape threats, emails “reporting [my] life minute by minute”, to show her that she was being closely watched.
She and her colleagues coped by laughing it off. “And then our friend Hrant Dink was killed [by a Turkish nationalist on 19 January 2007]. One day before that, we were joking – you know, comparing our death threats.”
Her books began to be used as evidence in people’s arrests; soon after, six or seven columns were published calling for her own detention. Then, one night, she woke to find that the iron bars on her windows had been removed and a window left open. Nothing was taken, but, she writes, “I took it as a message saying: ‘We could do it.’” On 6 November 2016, she called her mother from Zagreb, Croatia, to tell her she wasn’t coming back: “A one-minute phone call; half of it was silence. But that’s all it took for me, in the autumn of 2016, to become homeless.” She was 43.
“I despise telling this story,” she writes, seven lines into Nation of Strangers. It makes her “cringe – politically, morally, emotionally”. She fears “appearing as yet another whining exile demanding recognition” and hates the objectification and alienation the label represents. She is alive to how often the word is used as a comforter by the (usually western) user: “they” are exiles who should be grateful; ‘“we” are a civilised haven. The challenge, she writes, is to work out “how to speak like a homeless person yet not sound like a victim or a survivor”.
Her response was to urge caution about the fragility of such havens, writing three books in which novelist, poet, reporter and political columnist merged with a lifetime of travelling and absorbing culture (from the writings of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the Sufi mystic Mansur al-Hallaj to French films, Leonard Cohen and Pikachu) to produce a kind of aphoristic, flaying clarity. And to write them all in English.
It wasn’t just that her target audience was different. English was a way of denying her feelings. “It was really complicated, you know, what I went through,” she says, staring out of the window of the rental property in Barcelona where she is staying with her partner, towards a secondary school where the students are being cheerfully harangued via a megaphone. Her cigarette smoke curls across the screen on our video call. When she chose to move to Zagreb, she knew just one person in the city; she had seen a billboard in the airport that read: “Why Zagreb?”
“It was a question people asked me all the time later on when I started living there, meaning: why would anyone like me go to Zagreb?” she says. “As in, instead of London or Berlin. And this is exactly why I stayed there.
“I wanted to be alone and really understand what had happened to me all these years. Why and how people let go of those whom they are supposed to support. I know many people think of fascism as evil guys coming along and taking over, but, no, it doesn’t happen like that. It happens with a million complacencies – and those complacencies, especially if you experience that in your private life and in your public life, break your heart in an impossible way. And I had to deal with that heartbreak, I think. It took me 10 years to call it a heartbreak, by the way.”
She also had to deal with all the things she had seen before leaving. Recently, the writer Pankaj Mishra told her he had noticed that in public she always begins in 2016. “You never tell the other bits,” as she puts it now: reporting on the aftermath of earthquakes; interviewing a mother who had chosen to run over her daughter with a tractor to forestall an even worse “honour” killing (“of course, she lost her mind”); charting “how people kill each other for stories”, usually nationalist narratives. She makes a sound of complete disgust. “And I said [to Mishra]: ‘I wouldn’t tell the westerners, because they’d be traumatised.’”
She laughs. “It’s a line I borrowed from Ziko [an interviewee in Nation of Strangers]. It is traumatising. And when I tell it, it feels unreal. And I don’t like the look in people’s eyes. I become an object to observe.”
Writing in Turkish would be “too emotional”, she felt. She wanted to “be a brain, only a brain” – and the linguistic distance of English allowed that. She refused to listen to Turkish music or meet Turkish people; she wrote and talked and wrote and talked. And then she ended up at the doctor’s. There is a moment in Nation of Strangers, some time after this visit, where she ventures tentatively into the Turkish area of Berlin and finally has a Turkish coffee. The world does not disintegrate; in fact, it becomes a little more whole. And that is her point. National stories urgently need to be told differently. The personal is political. Specifically, emotion is political, especially in a world where, as Temelkuran argues, more and more of us feel unhomed. This may be because we have literally been forced to leave our homes, or because we are at war, or because the political ground has shifted beneath us and we no longer recognise the country we live in; because AI is reshaping work, or the cost of living has ejected us from a life we recognise; because the climate crisis is changing the weather and the face of the Earth. The left ignores this at its peril, she argues, not least because the right certainly hasn’t.
Temelkuran spent much of the past five months on a book tour. In every audience, she says, she met at least one “American exile”. “These people are calling themselves exiles. They say: ‘I came from the United States because I felt under threat. I felt like this wasn’t my country any more.’ And their voices start trembling, because they are new in the game, and I make jokes and make them laugh, like: ‘Welcome to the club.’” Many Germans feel it, too, she says.
“Those who write and think and talk – we have a new moral responsibility, not only to understand and analyse, but to care about how people feel at this point,” she says. “Loneliness, fear, anxiety, uncertainty: all these emotions have political consequences and those consequences today are utilised, weaponised, organised and mobilised by the far right. What they have done, from the very beginning, is a masterclass in emotion management.”
Not only is democracy failing, Temelkuran argues, but also the left has failed to understand how to deal with the results of that failure. She has been thinking a lot about the arrogance of the west, but especially about “our own arrogance as progressives, as intellectuals, as the cultural elite, if we can call it that. We still think somebody will ask us what to do and what we think. But in this new world order that’s been building, in a very speedy way, we don’t count.
“People get angry when I draw parallels between Turkey and European countries. But I am doing it mainly because I don’t want people to fail in the way that we did, to make the same mistakes. We went through that arrogance – and that arrogance cost us our country.”
She is impatient with those who ask her to define fascism, who suggest that what she is speaking of is authoritarianism. She turns the question back on them: “Why don’t you call it fascism?” She believes there are a few reasons. First, many westerners believe “there cannot be fascism in a free-market economy, which was established as a natural fact after the Berlin Wall came down”. Second, there is the search for comfort: a strict historical definition of fascism means it can be put inside the box marked “second world war” and the lid closed. Third is plain fear: “We cannot be one of those crazy countries.”
But mostly it is about responsibility, she says: “Once you call it fascism, you have to do something about it. If you call it authoritarianism, right-wing populism, you can sit back and treat this political phenomenon as a passing fancy: people have gone mad for a while. They’re going to vote for these leaders, they’re going to get their taste and then it will be over.”
This makes it easier to laugh off, she says: “I think the UK has been stuck at the laughter stage for quite a long time. That laughter is very strong. It is inherent to British culture. And it is not easy to separate it from cynicism … But nothing is hilarious at the moment and people should allow themselves to be very serious.
“I’m afraid when Nigel Farage comes to power, if Nigel Farage comes to power, when Trump shows up in London, when Jared Kushner comes with his new PowerPoint plans about, I don’t know, the NHS, they will still feel like they have to laugh about it just to feel safe.”
I mention that I walked alongside a short section of Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” march last month and thought how many of those marching were probably there because of a sense of loss or imminent loss – of a recognisable home, of a possible future. The fact that this was expressed through St George and crusader flags – and read as aggressively exclusionary and threatening to anyone who didn’t look like the marchers – doesn’t erase that. This isn’t mentioned much in her books, which focus on progressive, left-leaning losses.
“I am not one of those liberals who thinks that: ‘Oh, we should always have a dialogue,’” replies Temelkuran. “We should always know fascism when there is fascism. You don’t have a dialogue. You just fight against it. Period. But on the other hand, I think home stands at the heart of the zeitgeist today for several reasons. I lost my home because of fascism – but then those who are afraid of losing their homes are weaponising [loss of home] to build fascism. Home stands at the centre of all this debate.”
Temelkuran is with Iris Murdoch, who in books such as The Sovereignty of Good argued that paying attention was a moral act, that real, humble and open attention is the essence of care. The tough reporter part of her is embarrassed even to say it, she admits, but attention is the essence of human love: “Paying attention is being there, I think, rather than staring at the situation. Being in the reality, not observing it.”
It means paying attention to all-comers, not just to specific political tribes, or differentiating between people within or outside a particular national story; being open to and accepting the messiness of it and making a concerted effort to see how much we have in common, rather than what splits us apart. “Yes, let’s talk about loss of home, but let’s talk about it from the perspective of human love.”
She says she has been struck in recent months that “when I start speaking along those lines and with that particular tone about human love in a political context, people start getting teary eyes. Literally, I’ve seen so many people cry. And it’s not because I had this profound revelation. They are exhausted. They’re exhausted from being in survival mode: ‘I’m not going to feel anything. I’m not going to allow myself to be vulnerable.’”
Temelkuran’s parents got together after Erol, a young lawyer, had Lale, the militant-left woman who would become his wife, released from jail by sending a general photos of his own daughter taking part in a demonstration. (Lale had been locked up for distributing the last letters of three students hanged by the military in the 1971 coup.) For Temelkuran, politics has never been a parlour game, an airing of ideas after which “everyone goes back to their homes”. It is about morality: “Your political choice is also a moral choice. It is this thing that makes you who you are – very bluntly, whether you’re a good person or a bad person.
“I think our political vocabulary will be less soft from now on. I think we will have to talk about sacrifice very soon,” she adds. “Gaza was an experiment, in that sense. Are you going to sacrifice your career, your social environment? That question has been asked to us. Some of us answered correctly, some of us not. But then that question will get wider and more profound. It will absorb all of us.”
Each summer, Temelkuran’s family meets on a Greek island in the Aegean sea. Her brother and his family come from the US, her parents from Turkey. It is not a place, she writes, that will “usually pop up in your email inbox as a destination in travel ads”. It is a village on Lesbos, the island that hosted Moria, the now closed refugee camp that was the largest in Europe. They chose Lesbos because it was easy for her parents to reach. For a week, they make a point of trying not to discuss dark topics – but it is hard when, in clear weather, they can see the Turkish coast from across the bay.
