DINA NAYERI
Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels, a book of nonfiction, and many award-winning essays and short stories on displacement, exile, and the refugee crisis. Most recently, The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), was winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis, and finalist for The LA Times Book Prize, Kirkus Prize, and ELLE Grand Prix des Lectrices. A 2019-2020 fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, her work been awarded an NEA grant in literature and UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, and been published in 20+ countries and in The New York Times, New Yorker, The Guardian, Granta, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. Her next two books are forthcoming in 2023 and 2024, and her children's book, The Waiting Place, about a refugee camp in Greece is forthcoming in 2022. Her playwriting work has been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London and shortlisted for the Paines Plough Women's Prize. She was an autumn 2021 Fellow at the American Library in Paris and has recently joined the permanent faculty at the University of St Andrews.
Read more on her website.
SESSION: Truth and Storytelling: on Vulnerability, Privilege, and Who Gets Believed
A Q&A with Dina Nayeri about truth and storytelling in various realms of life, and what she's learned in writing, in the corporate world, and working with refugees. Why does truth remake itself for some, while others are forced to tell their stories in prescriptive ways? And how does this relate to the larger question of how we all tell our stories, and the western ways of storytelling?