Dina Nayeri

Nayeri holds a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and a Master of Education and MBA from Harvard University. She also holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Her second novel, Refuge, was published in 2017, also by Riverhead Books. Refuge is a semi-autobiographical novel whose chapters are written alternately from the point of view of Niloo Hamidi, an Iranian woman who emigrated to the United States and, at the time of the novel, is teaching anthropology at a university in Amsterdam, and Bahman Hamidi, her father, a dentist and oral surgeon living in Isfahan, Iran. Niloo's chapters relating her current life in the Netherlands are in the third person, as are Bahman's chapters, while flashback chapters about Niloo's four visits with her father in four different cities are narrated in the first person by Niloo.

Nayeri's first novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was published in 2014 by Riverhead Books (Penguin) and translated into 14 languages.

Upon reaching the United States Nayeri lived as a refugee, "in refugee hostels," for a number of years. When she was 15, in 1994, she became an American citizen, alongside her mother and brother. In 2001 she graduated from Princeton. In 2003 she married Philip Viergutz, a French citizen. She worked in New York City as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and later as a strategic manager at Saks Fifth Avenue. She lived for some years in Amsterdam with her husband.

Nayeri was born in Isfahan, Iran. Her mother was a doctor and her father a dentist. She spent the first 8 years of her life in Isfahan but fled Iran with her mother and brother Daniel in 1988 because her mother had converted to Christianity and the moral police of the Islamic Republic had threatened her with execution. Nayeri, her mother and her brother spent two years in Dubai and Rome as asylum seekers and eventually settled in Oklahoma, in the United States. Her father remained in Iran, where he still lives.

Dina Nayeri (born 1979) is an Iranian American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She wrote the novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2014) and Refuge (2017).