Ece Temelkuran in Conversation with Razia Iqbal
Apr 2nd 2025
Events @ Labyrinth Books
Wednesday 4/2 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books
122 Nassau Street
How to Lose a Country is a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. Award-winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran identifies the early warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world from Eastern Europe to South America, in order to arm the reader with the tools to recognize it and take action.
Weaving memoir, history and clear-sighted argument, Temelkuran proposes alternative answers to the pressing – and too often paralyzing – political questions of our time. How to Lose a Country is an exploration of the insidious ideas at the core of these movements and an urgent, eloquent defense of democracy.
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist, a political thinker and a public speaker whose work has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, La Stampa, New Statesman and Der Spiegel, among several international media outlets. 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. Her most recent book, Together, was shortlisted for the Terzani Award in Italy. She has twice been recognized as Turkey’s most read political columnist. Razia Iqbal is John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor at Princeton University’s School for Public and International Affairs. For the last three decades, she worked at the BBC, most recently anchoring Newshour, the current affairs program with 12.5 million listeners in the U.S. and millions more elsewhere. Iqbal has presented the in-depth interview series Witness History, Talking Books and Dream Builders as well as documentaries for both radio and TV. She is a frequent moderator at political and literary events.
This event is sponsored by The Forum on the History of Political Thought in Princeton's University Center for Human Values. Labyrinth extends our gratitude to the cosponsors of this event in the Princeton University community:
Center for Collaborative History
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of English
Department of German
Humanities Council
Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton
Princeton Writing Program
Program in European Cultural Studies
Program in Law and Normative Thinking