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, El Pais, 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 and  her most recent book, TOGETHER was 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. She lived in Zagreb after the military coup attempt in  Turkey in 2016 and after her fellowship at The New Institute in Hamburg, she is currently a fellow at Robert Bosch Foundation, working on a project/book "Home: A new definition for the 21st Century.” She ran lettersfromnow.com, a digital  communication project based on her book TOGETHER. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and Democracy Next also a regular contributor to Internazionale magazine. She wrote libretto for opera and her novels are adapted to  stage both in and outside Turkey.  

She won the El Mundo Award for her body of work in 2023.  

A Turkish woman with dark curly hair stands arms folded

Agenda

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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.