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This week, say hello to award-winning Turkish journalist, novelist, author, political thinker, and public speaker, Ece Temelkuran who left Turkey in 2016 “exhausted from fear and paralysed with anger” when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “purge of the opposition began”.1
In her 2019 book "How to Lose a Country” - Ece documented the seven steps she observed about the transition from democracy to dictatorship both at home and abroad.
As she works on her new book “Nation of Strangers” , I sit down with Ece to ask: has the future been as bad as she expected it to be? Does the pursuit of a culturally cosmopolitan, globally informed, worldly life unhinge us? And what is “home” for storymakers like Ece, when home becomes a dictatorship?
“The first book her mother read to her was “The Little Black Fish” by Samed Behrengi, in which a little black fish leaves her friends and family for the ‘big sea’. Her mother changed the ending of the story, so she would not find out that the fish never returned home. She always thought that after learning enough stories she would go back home. This must be the reason why she is still wandering the World and collecting stories.” - ecetemelkuran.net.
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