Available as Paperback
An urgent call to action from one of Europe’s most well-regarded political thinkers and a field guide to spotting the insidious patterns and mechanisms of the populist wave sweeping the globe – with a new foreword to the 2024 edition
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 recognise it and take action.
Weaving memoir, history and clear-sighted argument, Temelkuran proposes alternative answers to the pressing – and too often paralysing – 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 defence of democracy.
This 2024 edition includes a new foreword by the author.
“Highly readable and vibrates with outrage”
the Times
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“A brilliant analysis of how democracy can be starved to death. It’s one of the most important books anyone could read at the moment, when public institutions are slowly being corrupted wherever we look”
Philip Pullman
“This is essential”
Margaret Atwood On Twitter
“The burning topic of today: populism. Vivid, visionary, terrifyingly familiar, this book is essential reading for everyone on planet Earth”
Andrew Sean Greer
”How to Lose a Country is a succinct and hard-hitting explainer on the rise of populism in Turkey and elsewhere, with a running refrain to western nations that consider themselves free from the threat of authoritarianism: this can happen to you”
financial Times
Ece Temelkuran
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. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed book How to Lose a Country and her most recent book, Together, was shortlisted for the Terzani Award in Italy. She has twice been recognised as Turkey’s most read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people on social media (with nearly three million followers).
ecetemelkuran.net | @ETemelkuran | @ece.temelkuran
