Nation of Strangers featuring Ece Temelkuran and Juliet Stevenson

Dear stranger. Are you home? Do you feel at home? For how much longer?

Across the world the number of refugees and exiles, the dispossessed and displaced, the politically homeless and the economically excluded is growing. In the decade since she left her own home, Ece Temelkuran has been a political Cassandra, warning those convinced it couldn’t happen in their country that fascism is coming.

Now, as oppression spreads and temperatures rise – as we face competing crises and learn, again and again, that no institution is so concrete it can’t turn to dust, and no home is too strong to be destroyed – she has written Nation of Strangers: a series of letters from one stranger to another.

Politically attuned and deeply personal, this extraordinary, heartening correspondence is a gift to treasure in uncertain times. As poetic as it is precise, it is a book for anyone who feels alienated by an ever-more monstrous world. It shows how, as we all become strangers, our home will depend on the strength we find with one another.

Join co-hosts Jon Alexander and Omezzine Khelifa for this one-off live recording of How To Save Democracy, the podcast which aims to heal society’s broken relationship with democracy. Alongside readings from acclaimed actor Juliet Stevenson, bringing the book’s letters to life, the event asks how, in this age of alienation, we might together reimagine the concept of “home” for the 21st century.

Speakers:

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and public speaker whose work has been published worldwide. Her novels, Women Who Blow on Knots and The Time of Mute Swans, have been published in several languages and adapted to the stage. Temelkuran’s two political essays, Deep Mountain: Across the Armenian–Turkish Divide and Turkey: The Insane and Melancholy, explore the connection between the personal and political. After she left her country in 2016, Temelkuran began writing in English. Her first book in this language, How to Lose a Country, received international praise. Her second, Together, offers ‘a way out from the political and moral insanity’ that is ushered by the global rise of fascism. Ece Temelkuran has lived in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris and Zagreb. She is currently based in Berlin and is on the advisory board of Progressive International and DemocracyNext.

After being part of the Tunisian Revolution in January 2011, Omezzine Khelifa left an investment banking and fintech career in France to contribute to the democratic transition in Tunisia in the wake of the Arab uprisings. After twice running for parliament, managing national political campaigns and becoming an elected member of the political bureau of social democratic party Ettakatol, she became senior adviser to the minister of tourism and later finance after her party won Tunisia’s first free and fair elections. She is a serial social and political entrepreneur, who currently leads the Tax Fairness programme at the School of Moral Ambition in Amsterdam, alongside co-hosting the How To Save Democracy podcast.

Jon Alexander is the author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, and co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a book and company that work to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. Among other plaudits, CITIZENS was listed by McKinsey as one of its Top 5 Recommended Books in its Summer Reading Guide 2022, described as “an underground hit” in the Financial Times, and selected by the World Economic Forum for its CEO Book Club. Jon began his career with a decade in the advertising industry, before shifting his attention to understanding how communications skills might be deployed to invite people into their agency as citizens, instead of just selling stuff to them as consumers.

Juliet Stevenson is an award-winning screen and stage actor, perhaps best known for appearing in a host of successful films, including Truly Madly Deeply, Bend It Like Beckham and Emma. Juliet is also a well-known activist and advocate for organisations including Amnesty International, Health Workers for Palestine and Breaking Barriers.