Award-winning writer Rabih Alameddine in conversation with Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayeri will lead a conversation (and open Q&A) with award-winning writer Rabih Alameddine on displacement, refugee tourism, and humour, and storytelling as tools for social change.

In the New York Times Book Review, Dina called Alameddine's sixth novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope, “spectacular”. This wise and funny story of a trans Lebanese-American doctor in the Greek isles is “the first novel I've read that gives ample room to the ugliness of certain camp volunteers (the bored, the coddled, those battling pangs of uselessness) and the many humiliations some inflict on the displaced”.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; and The Hakawati; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He has also won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Harold Washington Literary Award.

The Angel of History won the Lambda Literary Award and several others and An Unnecessary Woman was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critiques Circle Award, and the PEN open book award, as well as being winner of many others.