Who Gets Believed?

Who Gets Believed?

When the Truth Isn’t Enough

Summary

The prizewinning author of The Ungrateful Refugee asks who is believed in our society, who is not - and why?

'An ambitious and moving exploration of the borders we draw around credible victimhood that will cement Nayeri's position as a master storyteller of the refugee experience' Guardian

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.

'An important, courageous, brilliant book'
Robert Macfarlane
, bestselling author of Underland

'Dina Nayeri asks an incredibly important question, and the answers she finds are crucial for all of us'
Oliver Bullough
, bestselling author of Butler to the World

Reviews

  • An elegant telling of truth to power... published at a poignant moment
    Observer

About the author

Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a prize-winning book of creative non-fiction, The Ungrateful Refugee. A 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and was selected for The Best American Short Stories, among other accolades. Her work has been published in more than twenty countries and in the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Granta and many other publications. Dina has degrees from Princeton, Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was born in Iran and currently lives in Scotland, where she teaches at the University of St Andrews.
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