One summer’s evening in 2022, the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran found herself in a doctor’s office in Hamburg, Germany, lying flat on a stretcher with an IV drip in her arm. After six intense years of work and travel, her body was in revolt. “I now know that I need to talk,” she writes in her latest book, Nation of Strangers, which was shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s prize for nonfiction. “I fear that not speaking will make me really sick. And when homeless, you cannot afford to get sick.”
In fact, she had not been silent in the preceding years: she had published two well-received books, How To Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism (2019) and Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World (2021). She had spoken her warnings in public, too, on stages all across the west, saying: this is what happened to us in Turkey – make sure it doesn’t happen to you, too. And she is not technically homeless; she lives in Berlin. But by “speaking” and by “home”, Temelkuran means something specific yet vast. Nation of Strangers posits that the idea of home, and the emotions that idea contains, is one of the dominant political forces of our time.
