Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayeri is an Iranian-American novelist, essayist and memoirist, born in Isfahan in 1979. ¹ She left Iran as a child in 1988 after her mother converted to Christianity, lived as a refugee in Dubai and Italy, and settled in Oklahoma; her books include the novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea and Refuge and the memoir The Ungrateful Refugee (2019). ¹

Nayeri was born in Isfahan, the daughter of a doctor and a dentist. She spent her first eight years there; her mother converted to Christianity, and after the morality police threatened her mother with execution the family fled Iran in 1988, when Nayeri was eight, travelling with her mother and her brother Daniel while her father remained in Iran. ¹ They spent two years in Dubai and Rome as asylum seekers before settling in Oklahoma in the United States, and she became an American citizen in 1994, at fifteen. ¹ She took a bachelor's degree at Princeton University and a master's in education and a master's in business administration at Harvard, and later an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; she worked in New York as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and as a strategic manager at Saks Fifth Avenue. ¹ She lived for some years in Amsterdam, then in London from 2015, and now lives in Scotland. ¹ The conversion and flight described above are her mother's story, recorded here as her family's history; the sources state no religion for Nayeri herself, and the museum records none. ^{1 2}

Her first novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2013), has been translated into fourteen languages. ¹ Her second, Refuge (2017), is a semi-autobiographical novel alternating between an Iranian woman teaching in Amsterdam and her father, a dentist in Isfahan, and is closely modelled on her own four visits with her father over thirty years. ¹ Her creative nonfiction includes The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), an account of her family's flight and of the asylum system, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and won the Geschwister Scholl Prize and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize; The Waiting Place (2020); and Who Gets Believed (2023), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. ¹ She won an O. Henry Prize in 2015 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2016. ¹

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