A Good Crisis (and how not to waste it):

Ten years ago, Ece Temelkuran fled Turkey to escape the regime. She wrote books, gave lectures and won awards, but four years ago her body gave up. The diagnosis? Homesickness. She will talk to Annelies Beck about her new book, Nation of Strangers, and how we, as strangers among strangers, can set about ‘rebuilding home in the twenty-first century’.

dear stranger

‘Who are you?’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘How will you survive here?’

‘When will you go home?

These are the four questions Ece Temelkuran asks in her new book, Nation of Strangers, in four long and probing letters addressed to a ‘Dear stranger’. We are all that stranger, and we need each other to feel at home.

a new home

All over the world, the number of refugees and exiles is rising – displaced and expelled people, politically stateless and economically excluded. Oppression and fascism are spreading, no home is safe from destruction. Nation of Strangers is a book for anyone who feels alienated from an increasingly inhuman world in which crises are piling up. These powerful letters, at once universal and personal, show how strangers can find strength in each other.

crisis

‘Never waste a good crisis.’ These words are attributed to Winston Churchill, who is said to have uttered them at the founding of the United Nations. The word ‘crisis’ stems from the Greek ‘krinein’, which means ‘to decide’. If it is true that we make the best decisions in dire situations, then we are living in fruitful times. With the new interview series A Good Crisis, we bring together, in collaboration with Flagey, writers and thinkers from home and abroad to assess how bad things really are and explore where the opportunities lie.

about the author

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and speaker. Her work has been published worldwide. In 2015 she was writer-in-residence at Passa Porta, where she developed a friendship with Annelies Beck. After leaving her homeland in 2016 she wrote How to Lose a Country, which was widely acclaimed. She currently lives in Berlin and sits on the advisory boards of Progressive International and DemocracyNext.

about the interviewer

Annelies Beck (b. 1973) is a writer, journalist and presenter of Terzake. She has also written two novels: Over het kanaal (2011), a historical novel set during World War I, and Toekomstkoorts (2019), about a Belgian attempt at colonization in Brazil.

Flagey, Passa Porta