ABOUT
ROBERT
Robert Templer is an author and public policy expert with experience in the media, international organizations, and civil society, focusing on evaluation, policy, climate change, and conflict.
He is an educator and policy analyst with significant management and media accomplishments.
Author of four books, former journalist, and a former public policy professor with extensive success in high-level public engagement and policy advocacy globally. He has worked or lived in every Asian country and across Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Deep expertise in climate, conflict, extremism, gender, displacement, development, and migration. Professor of Practice in Public Policy and founding faculty at the School of Public Policy at the Central European University. Founder of The Aleppo Project, bringing together refugees to preserve their culture in the face of urbicide. Founder of the Higher Education Alliance for Refugees.
Written for The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, the New Republic, and many other publications. Experienced in media and other strategic development, non-profit governance and management, and staff development. He taught policy development, strategic communications, writing, and NGO management at the University of California at Berkeley and the Central European University. Templer is a citizen of Ireland and New Zealand and lives in Barcelona.
THE SHAH'S PARTY
Colourfully narrates a bizarre three-day extravaganza thrown by Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty, alleged at the time to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The event, attended by leaders from around the world, ultimately helped to precipitate the Shah’s downfall.
The Shah’s Party captures Iran’s oil-rich boom years, before the Islamic Revolution, during which its economy grew faster than at any other time. In 1971, eight years before the imperial dynasty fell, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his glamorous wife, Farah Diba, hosted one of the largest gatherings of world leaders ever, celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy. But this stranger-than-fiction event, staged in a tented city by the ancient ruins of Persepolis, came amidst a rise in leftist agitation and a turn towards political Islam.
NUSANTARA
In Nusantara, Robert Templer brings to life the story of Indonesia’s new capital, being built in the forests of Kalimantan. The new city, planned for completion in 2045, aims to be a green and smart city, a model for future development in the world’s fourth most populous country.
SHADOWS & WIND
In Shadows and Wind, Robert Templer paints a fascinating and fresh picture of a country usually viewed with hazy nostalgia or deep suspicion. Here is Hanoi, an increasingly tense and troubled city approaching its millennium but uncertain of its direction. Here are people emerging from a long wilderness of malnutrition, discovering a new lifestyle of leisure and luxury.
A BASILISK
GLANCE
Poison— invisible, unknown, hard to detect and deadly— taps into hard-wired anxieties about the risks of the world around us. From ancient times to the modern age, it has always created more fear than any other threats. In A Basilisk Glance: Poisoners from Plato to Putin, author Robert Templer takes us through the dark maze of poison.