is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow On Knots and the Ambassador Of New Europe Award for her book Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed book How to lose a country. Her latest book is Together. Temelkuran lives in Zagreb.
Three opposition journalists from Turkey, Russia and Hungary talk to Eurozine’s editor-in-chief about repressive regimes, personal risk, migration, the role of the media and the future of their profession in the digital age.
‘My pain is deciphered and therefore human. She, on the other hand is a muted creature; easier to misinterpret and, finally, dehumanize.’ Ece Temelkuran describes her deep unease at being referred to as an ‘exile’ and how, despite that public role, she shares a fundamental experience with the unnamed refugee.
“As the building sites progress and the Middle Eastern dust stirred up by the war begins to settle, questions are starting to be asked. Is it possible to found a land of dreams together with those who have shattered every last dream in the Middle East? What are the Kurds, the accursed of the Middle East, going to do?” For Kurds in Turkey and in Iraq, US investment in Kurdistan is both a blessing and a burden, writes journalist Ece Temelkuran.
