Ece Temelkuran

About

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist, a political thinker, and a public speaker whose work has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, La Stampa, New Statesman, and Der Spiegel, among several international media outlets.

She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow On Knots and the Ambassador Of New Europe Award for her book Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed book How to Lose a Country. Her latest bookTogether: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World has been published in several languages and recently shortlisted for the Terzani Award in Italy. Ece Temelkuran lived in Beirut, Tunis, Paris, to write her novels. She was a visiting fellow at Saint Anthony's College Oxford to write Deep Mountain: Across The Armenian Turkish Divide.

For the last five years, she has lived in Zagreb after the military coup attempt in Turkey in 2016. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and a regular contributor to Internazionale magazine.

A Turkish woman with dark curly hair stands arms folded

Agenda
Oct
26
Reimagining what’s possible: From authoritarianism and othering to democracy and belonging
Belonging in its truest sense means that people in any system or container have the right to not only be included within it, but to make demands on that system and even change the structure of that system itself. In an ideal form, democracy grants everyone the opportunity to change the nature of how our system functions—a critical component of belonging at the structural level. And yet, democratic systems have so often generated the opposite of belonging– prioritizing majority interests over minority needs, reinforcing structural racism and economic inequality, and facilitating the election of...