The Ungrateful Refugee
What Immigrants Never Tell You
Dina Nayeri
“In a refugee camp, stories are everything. Everyone has one, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare.”
Available as Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
A timely, provocative and personal examination of the refugee experience
‘A vital book for our times’ ROBERT MACFARLANE
‘Unflinching, complex, provocative’ NIKESH SHUKLA
‘A work of astonishing, insistent importance’ Observer
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. Now, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with those of other asylum seekers in recent years. In these pages, 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.
Surprising and provocative, 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.
“Dina Nayeri has written a vital book for our times. The Ungrateful Refugee gives voice to those whose stories are too often lost or suppressed. Braiding memoir, reportage and essayism, Nayeri allows those fortunate enough to have never been stateless or displaced to glimpse something of the hardships and subtleties of the refugee experience. Written with compassion, tenderness and a burning anger, her book appears at the end of a decade in which division and dislocation have risen to a terrible pitch. It speaks powerfully from – and to – the heart. Please read it”
Robert Macfarlane
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“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”
observer
“This is a humane and compelling book that seeks to make human those demonised by the media and governing bodies for so long. Nayeri is never sentimental and her accounts of refugee lives, including her own, are unflinching, complex, provocative and important”
Nikesh Shukla
“Dina Nayeri’s powerful writing confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
“A thoughtful investigation … This wide-ranging, reasoned book is no polemic: its observations are self-reflective, contemplative and significant”
financial Times
Dina Nayeri
Dina Nayeri was born in Iran during the revolution and arrived in America when she was ten years old. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. The author of two novels – Refuge and A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea – and contributor to The Displaced, her work has been published in over twenty countries. Her stories and essays have been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, the New York Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Granta and many other publications. She lives in London.
@DinaNayeri | dinanayeri.com
Why They Fear Ilhan Omar
“This isn’t about America’s welfare or Omar’s qualifications. Quite the opposite: Trump and Carlson see Omar’s potential and are desperate to clip her wings—and the wings of every immigrant who may come into her gifts on American soil. These men understand that the most powerful immigrants—those they see as threats—are the ones who actually took their vile instructions to heart and did everything we were asked to do. We became American, and highly educated ones too. In so changing, we found our voices. We saw that, though we were born in far unluckier places, we have all the same talents as our Western-born peers. We saw that we can compete and win. We learned that in America, if you see injustice or hypocrisy, you don’t bow lower, always afraid of being tossed back to the hell you once knew. You fight for every hard-earned belief.”
Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee, gives the perfect respone to Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, “mediocre men raised at the trough of extreme Western privilege”.
Dina Nayeri
Slate