Hello my name is Ece Temelkuran. I am the author of How to Lose a Country and I
try to lay out the seven common patterns of global rising right-wing populism.
I am from Turkey and we have experienced the most devastating form of right-wing
populism as you might have already noticed but this book is not about
Turkey at all, it's about the entire world and probably about your country too
I noticed seven common patterns within all these countries that have been
subjected to rising right-wing populism and I wrote about them. It's a book that
tells stories of people, stories of me and also there is some theoretical parts
in the book. I'm here in Waterstones Piccadilly and I want to share three
books that are very special to me today. One of them is Clarice Lispector, near
to the Wild Heart. Clarice Lispector is a Brazilian
writer and she is in fact known to be the Brazilian Virginia Woolf. She's an
amazingly beautiful woman and in fact she acted in movies as well but also an
amazing amazing author. She does hardcore literature so it's not a page-turner, the
books that she has written. She is also special writer to me because
this is one of the writers I share with my very, very close friend Annalise Peck
who's also a novelist. So whenever I get really tired of life let's say and the
banality of it in general I just open a page and read a few sentences to remind
myself where I actually belong: to literature. And the second one is another
fiction writer that I, not only as a writer, but also a political figure, adore.
Arundhati Roy wrote The God of Small Things years and
years ago. And she wrote this one novel and she got the Man Booker award
as you already know. Arundhati Roy is a political figure and I, you know, admire
her for being so vocal about several political issues that we have
been grappling with lately. She later wrote a more political novel called
Ministry of Utmost Happiness and she has been criticized after this novel for
her new novel and I find it quite unfair. Because she tries to put all those, you
know, impossible to untangle issues into literature and that is an amazing,
amazing effort I think. I met her once, years ago during the Iraq International
Tribunal. I was a journalist and she was there in the tribunal and while
I was interviewing her she called me...
'You are the girl with the big eyes.' So I hope she remembers me still. I can
never forget her. Here's a book from Hannah Arendt she's now famous all of a
sudden because of the political turmoil that all of us are going through. She was
not so popular a few years back but now she's on the bestseller list. This is one
of her books: Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil.
For anyone writing on today's political issues Hannah Arendt is a must-read,
obviously, but especially this book might be very inspiring for those people
who are fed up with banality of evil, the ordinariness of evil. In my book that's
going to be out in February I wrote that the term banality of evil should be
reversed in fact to become evil of banality and that's another long subject.
But Hannah Arendt is not only important
politically and philosophically also she's important to me personally because
of the subject of forgiveness. Hannah Arendt was a student, also lover, of Heidegger
when she was taking lessons from him. But Heidegger as
you might have you know learned already was a Nazi for a good part of his life.
So Hannah Arendt was a Jew, she had to run away from Germany to the United States
and then for 30 years she thought if she can forgive Heidegger. And 30 years later
she went back to Germany, she felt completely alien and we don't
really know if she really forgave Heidegger or not. That has always been a
curious question for me.