We are delighted to introduce Dina Nayarei as Trustee of Advocacy. Dina is a multi award winning author, who regularly writes abut refugee experiences and actively works to build a better understanding of migration in public discourse through her writing, sharing her story at events and speaking in schools.
Dina Nayeri was born during the Iranian revolution and lived as a refugee or two years before being granted asylum in the United States. She is the author of The Ungrateful Refugee, winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices, and called by The Observer “a work of astonishing, insistent importance.”
Dina has been a part of our movement since she traveled to Greece with Refugee Support in 2017 and 2018, her first visit to a refugee camp since living in one as a child. The experience was transformative and inspiring. She wrote about it in “The Ungrateful Refugee” and has been writing and speaking about Refugee Support since.
Her essay of the same name was one of The Guardian’s most widely read long reads in 2017, taught in schools across Europe, and anthologized by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Nguyen who wrote, “Dina Nayeri’s powerful writing confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.”
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 grant, the O. Henry Prize, and Best American Short Stories, and was a finalist for the 2017 Rome Prize, among other honours. Her work has been published in 20+ countries and in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications.
Her playwriting work has been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London and shortlisted for the Paines Plough Women’s Prize.
She has a BA from Princeton, and masters degrees from Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Iowa Writers Workshop (where she was a Teaching Writing Fellow). She was an autumn 2021 Fellow at the American Library in Paris and has recently joined the permanent faculty at University of St. Andrews.
We are very honored to have Dina join us at such an exciting time of growth, but also at a time that poses unprecedented challenges to refugee rights globally. Dina really understands the work we do and that dignity is at the center of our ethos. We look forward to working with Dina and hearing her ideas on how to grow our community and to further improve our aid distribution services across our dignity centers.
