Hi, I’m Dina
I tell stories—novels, short stories, essays, memoir and plays. I teach writing at the University of St Andrews, speak about creativity and craft, review books. My work so far has explored the refugee experience because I was one, a long time ago. I wrote The Ungrateful Refugee, both the viral essay and the award-winning book, and Who Gets Believed? My books are published in more than twenty countries and taught in schools across the US and Europe and The Guardian once called me “a master storyteller of the refugee experience.” But I don’t just write about displacement. I write about pain and change, trust, power, vulnerability. In writing and in life, I like drama: flawed people being messy.
This space is a peek into my creative world. I love building tight, character-driven narratives, vanishing into other voices, and reading and writing stories with catastrophe at the centre. Lately, I’ve been deep in dialogue and subtext, and obsessed with stage plays. When I’m not writing my own stuff, I help others find their voice and shape their stories, and to build a satisfying (even thrilling) creative practice, which, for me, has been the point of everything.
Recent Release
Who Gets Believed?
Why are honest asylum seekers dismissed as liars?
Dina Nayeri’s wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability in our society. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask – where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed?
What does this mean for our culture?
As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.
Who Gets Believed? is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
The Guardian“Instantly gripping… a master storyteller of the refugee experience.””
Robert Macfarlane“An important, courageous, brilliant book”
Author of Underland
Library Journal“Few books are as erudite, comprehensive, and intensely personal all at once.”
Buy Your Copy
More Books
Featured News
The New York Times “First Person” Podcast Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviews Dina
NPR’s “All Things Considered” Juana Summers interviews Dina
NPR features Who Gets Believed? as their Book of the Day
Short Publications
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America Loses Its Soul When It Rejects People Fleeing Danger
“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be ‘civilized.’… It is, I believe, to live with a moral standard that takes into account our fellow man, and to ask: What do we owe one another, and what do we owe strangers?”
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Foreign mothers, foreign tongues: ‘In another universe, she could have been my friend’
“Having grown up in different cultures with different expectations, my mother and I have often clashed. But as my daughter grows older, I have come to see our relationship in a different light.”
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“Pleasures, Again”
“It’s surprisingly easy to accept. After decades of trying to decide for yourself, reading the books, studying the philosophies, listening to the podcasts, worry-ing all your grad school friends with your weird existential phone calls. Are you happy? Am I happy? What is happy?“
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Talks & Interviews
‘The Ungrateful Refugee’ : Breaking Down Misconceptions about Immigrants
“Dina Nayeri explains her book, The Ungrateful Refugee, which draws on her own experience as a young refugee in the United States after her family fled Iran. Nayeri says that despite being Christian, her family found it difficult to be accepted. Asked about the title of her book, she says: ‘We are grateful, we do love our country… but that gratitude is private. It can’t be channelled, it can’t be forced.’”