Six top books on the refugee experience

Dina Nayeri is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee, a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize. Her essay of the same name was one of the most widely shared 2017 Long Reads in The Guardian. A 2019 Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination Fellow, winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant (2015), O. Henry Prize (2015), Best American Short Stories (2018), and fellowships from the McDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, and Yaddo, her stories and essays have been published by The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, Granta New Voices, Wall Street Journal, and many others. Her debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2013) was translated to 14 languages. Her second novel, Refuge (2017) was a New York Times editor’s choice. She holds a BA from Princeton, an MBA from Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and Teaching Writing Fellow. She lives in Paris.

At the Guardian, Nayeri tagged six of the best books on the refugee experience, including:

No memoir captures my own post-asylum years like Eva Hoffman’s 1989 account of adolescence as a clever but foreign girl (a child of Holocaust survivors relocating to Canada) with no money and a heap of desires. Lost in Translation was published the year I arrived in the US from Iran (via Dubai and Italy), in a way similar to Hoffman: a child with no choice, old enough to struggle with English, habits, shame. I could have used the book then. I didn’t discover it until I was at college, but its truth stung me again and again until I was numb, and delirious with the joy of being understood – not by just any immigrant girl, but by a Harvard graduate, and a former editor of the New York Times Book Review.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue