Ece Temelkuran: Nation of Strangers — In Conversation with Brian Eno
Turkish author Ece Temelkuran discusses displacement and the politically homeless with musician and thinker Brian Eno at Southbank Centre.
Why we picked this
Temelkuran has been warning about the mechanics of democratic collapse since before it became fashionable — and she has lived it. Pairing her with Brian Eno, who thinks about systems and collapse in his own way, should produce something better than a standard author event.
Ece Temelkuran left Turkey a decade ago as authoritarianism tightened its grip. Since then, she has been one of the most incisive voices writing about how democracies erode — not through sudden coups but through incremental normalization. Her new book, Nation of Strangers, takes the form of letters addressed from one displaced person to another, speaking to the growing global community of refugees, exiles, and the politically dispossessed.
The book builds on the warnings she laid out in How to Lose a Country, extending her analysis to the broader condition of people who no longer recognize — or are no longer recognized by — the nations they came from. It is both a political diagnosis and an act of solidarity.
In conversation with Brian Eno, whose thinking spans music, systems theory, and political philosophy, the evening promises an exchange that moves well beyond the book tour format. Eno’s own long engagement with questions of culture, belonging, and collective action makes him an unusually well-matched interlocutor for Temelkuran’s ideas.