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 of Türkiye, 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, shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, 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.
Tickets: £10
Part of City of Literature weekend — a Norfolk & Norwich Festival and National Centre for Writing presentation, programmed by the National Centre for Writing.
