Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough

＂Dina Nayeri’s powerful writing confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.＂--Viet Thanh Nguyen

From the author of The Ungrateful Refugee--finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Kirkus Prize--Who Gets Believed? is a groundbreaking book about persuasion and performance that asks unsettling questions about lies, truths, and the difference between being believed and being dismissed in situations spanning asylum interviews, emergency rooms, consulting jobs, and family life

Why are honest asylum seekers dismissed as liars?

Former refugee and award-winning author Dina Nayeri begins with this question, turning to shocking and illuminating case studies in this book, which grows into a reckoning with our culture’s views on believability. From persuading a doctor that she’d prefer a C-section to learning to ＂bullshit gracefully＂ at McKinsey to struggling, in her personal life, to believe her troubled brother-in-law, Nayeri explores an aspect of our society that is rarely held up to the light.

For readers of David Grann, Malcolm Gladwell, and Atul Gawande, Who Gets Believed? is a book as deeply personal as it is profound in its reflections on morals, language, human psychology, and the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.

Dina Nayeri was born during the Iranian revolution and lived as a refugee for 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.＂ 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 honors. 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. 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 is an autumn 2021 Fellow at the American Library in Paris and has just joined the faculty at University of St Andrews.