Who Gets Believed? A conversation with Dina Nayeri | Annual Harrell-Bond Lecture 2023

Dina Nayeri's new book Who Gets Believed? combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability in our society. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews, and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture?

Dina will be in conversation with Tom Scott-Smith, RSC Director.

The Lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

About the speaker

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and two books of creative nonfiction, Who Gets Believed? (2023) and The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), 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 Guardian “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, and is taught in schools and anthologized around the world. 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 literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and Best American Short Stories, 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.  Her short dramas have been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London.  She is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers Workshop.  In autumn 2021, she was a Fellow at the American Library in Paris. She is currently working on plays, screenplays, and her upcoming publications include The Waiting Place, a nonfiction children’s book about refugee camp, and Sitting Bird, a novel. She has recently joined the faculty at the University of St. Andrews. 

Podcast

Listen to the seminar podcast on SoundCloud.

Please direct enquiries to rsc-outreach@qeh.ox.ac.uk

Download the lecture poster.