About the book

What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought to, and yet there are more than 25 million refugees in the world. To be a refugee is to grapple with your place in society, attempting to reconcile the life you have known with a new, unfamiliar home. All this while bearing the burden of gratitude in your host nation: the expectation that you should be forever thankful for the space you have been allowed.

Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother, and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned–refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple falls in love over the phone, and women gather to prepare the noodles that remind them of home. A closeted queer man tries to make his case truthfully as he seeks asylum, and a translator attempts to help new arrivals present their stories to officials.

Nothing here is flattened; nothing is simplistic. Nayeri offers a new understanding of refugee life, confronting dangers from the metaphor of the swarm to the notion of “good” immigrants. She calls attention to the harmful way in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others. With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee recalibrates the conversation around the refugee experience. Here are the real human stories of what it is like to be forced to flee your home, and to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.

Praise & Reviews

Winner 2020 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
Winner 2020 Clara Johnson Award
Finalist 2021 Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices
Finalist 2019 Kirkus Prize
Finalist 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
#3 in the Oct. 2020 Die Zeit Best Nonfiction List
One of New York Post‘s Best Books of the Week
One of Literary Hub’s Best Reviewed Books
One of Literary Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019
The Ungrateful Refugee has made the September 2019 ABA Indie Next List!
Named 1 of 48 Books by Women and Nonbinary Authors of Color to Read in 2019 by Electric Literature
One of Bustle’s 15 books about asylum and immigration every person in the U.S. needs to read

“Dina Nayeri’s powerful writing confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.” 
―Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees

“Nayeri uses her first work of nonfiction to remind readers of the pain and horrors refugees face before and long after their settlement. It is timely, as President Trump has made barring refugees from the United States a priority, and the Western world is plagued with a surge in nativism. Nayeri combines her own experience with those of refugees she meets as an adult, telling their stories with tenderness and reverence.”
—The New York Times

“The Ungrateful Refugee is a thoughtful investigation combining a memoir of her former life… and a collection of case studies interrogating what it means to have been, or to be, a refugee. It is a provocative work…. richly expressed… This wide-ranging, reasoned book is no polemic: its observations are self-reflective, contemplative and significant.”
—The Financial Times

“Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee is a work of astonishing, insistent importance… This is a book full of revelatory truths, moments where we are plunged deeply and painfully into the quotidian experience of the refugee. ”
—The Observer

“Nayeri weaves her empowering personal story with those of the ‘feared swarms,’ asylum-seekers in Greece and the Netherlands . . . Using energetic prose, Nayeri is an excellent conduit for these heart-rending stories, eschewing judgment and employing care in threading the stories in with her own . . . This is a memoir laced with stimulus and plenty of heart at a time when the latter has grown elusive.”
— Minnesota Star Tribune

“Ultimately, The Ungrateful Refugee is an instruction book in how to be humane.”
— Michigan Quarterly Review 

“A gifted weaver of stories…. Dina Nayeri’s book is one of those that must be read by all who care about the survival of human solidarity.”
—The Irish Times

Featured News

The Ungrateful Refugee launched in Iceland with an interview in the front page of a major Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaði (Iceland’s most visited website), and Interview with Heimildin (newspaper of investigative journalism in Iceland), a review in RÚV, Víðsjá (state broadcasting radio), and an interview on a major Icelandic TV station RÚV TV

The Ungrateful Refugee is among Cosmopolitan’s best books on immigration

The Ungrateful Refugee is a finalist for Elle Grand Prix Des Lectrices

The Ungrateful Refugee makes NYT’s Paperback Row

The Ungrateful Refugee has been awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 2020

The Ungrateful Refugee is #3 in the 2020 Die Zeit Best Nonfiction List

The Ungrateful Refugee won the 2020 Clara Johnson Award

The Guardian’s top 25 Coronavirus distractions includes The Ungrateful Refugee

The Ungrateful Refugee is a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist!

Listen to Dina’s interview on MPR on breaking down refugee stereotypes

The Ungrateful Refugee is among New York Post’s best books of 2019

The Ungrateful Refugee is among Kirkus best of 2019