Journalist, commentator, and sharp interpreter of Turkish and international politics over the last two decades, Ece Temelkuran, born in 1973, worked for years for major publications such as Milliyet and Habertürk. Her investigative articles exposing Erdogan's regime and Turkish nationalism, the repression of Gezi Park youth, the denial of the Armenian genocide, and the massacres perpetrated against Kurds along the Turkey-Syria-Iraq border not only led to her firing from Habertürk but also drove her to leave Turkey. Today, she collaborates with some of the leading international media outlets (from CNN to The Guardian and The New York Times), and her writings are syndicated by numerous newspapers. An author of novels and short story collections, she became well-known in Italy most notably thanks to the essay How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship (Bollati Boringhieri, 2019), a critique of nationalisms and populisms, rooted in the Turkish case, which argues that Turkey "is far from being an exception linked to the Muslim religion or a typically Eastern authoritarian vision, but rather represents a possible model for all new right-wing movements intending to embark on 'the path leading from populism to dictatorship'" (Guido Caldiron il manifesto). Throughout her career, she has won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book Award and the Ambassador of New Europe Award and has twice been ranked among the ten most influential people on social media. Following Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now (2021), her touching book-manifesto on the increasingly structural condition of exile in our contemporary world, titled Nation of Strangers, was published by Bollati in 2026.

(foto: Twitter @ETemelkuran)