How can you feel at home and find meaning in a world of political unrest, migration, and social change? Ece Temelkuran and Alicja Gescinska sought answers to this question in a conversation with Simone Atangana Bekono about their latest books. Both authors know from personal experience what it is like to have to find a home again and again.

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker, and speaker. Her work is published worldwide. After being forced to leave her homeland in 2016, she wrote How to Lose a Country, for which she received much praise. She currently lives in Berlin and sits on the advisory boards of Progressive International and DemocracyNext. Her latest book, Nation of Strangers, which has just been published in Dutch translation, is a series of poignant, insightful, and sensitive letters about feeling at home, safety, and being rooted.

Alicja Gescinska, who fled communist Poland with her parents to Belgium in 1988, takes the reader on a turbulent and philosophical journey through the last century in her latest book, Women in Dark Times. In ten biographical portraits, she shows what humanity can learn from courageous and intelligent women who lived and worked in turbulent times, including Rosa Luxemburg, Anna Akhmatova, and Hannah Arendt. She previously wrote De gezichtslozen (The Faceless), about four women fighting to live their own lives.

Led by writer and poet Simone Atangana Bekono, both authors explored the tension between personal identity, collective memory, and today's political reality.

This Writers Unlimited Series program was in English and was created in collaboration with Uitgeverij Pluim. Afterwards, there was a book sale by De Vries Van Stockum with an opportunity for signing.