Who Gets Believed? with Dina Nayeri

What do we look for in other people’s stories? Is it the truth, or something we recognise from our own pasts and narratives, something we consider familiar, and safe?

In her book Who Gets Believed? Dina Nayeri combines deep research with personal experience examining what makes a story believable, and to who. Populated by voices in hospital waiting rooms, boardrooms and asylum interviews, it encourages each of us to question what we hear when we listen to someone else’s story, and what the uncovered patterns of power and bias mean for society at large.

Join us for a conversation with Dina about the stories we carry with us, and how they shape the way we receive someone else’s truth.

This event will be 30 mins followed by audience questions and signing. Please feel free to attend any or all of these depending on your capacity!

Our speaker:

Dina Nayeri is the author of two critically acclaimed nonfiction books Who Gets Believed (2023) and The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), and two previous novels. Who Gets Believed was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and The Ungrateful Refugee was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Kirkus Prize, and won Germany's prestigious Geschwister Scholl Prize. Her work is published in more than twenty countries and in The New York Times, Guardian, Granta, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories, and many other publications. Her essays and stories on displacement and home are taught in schools across Europe and the US. She is a Reader at the University of St Andrews.