She wrote the novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (2014) and Refuge (2017) and the creative nonfiction books: The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), The Waiting Place (2020), and Who Gets Believed (2023).
[1] Nayeri, her mother and brother spent two years in Dubai and Rome as asylum seekers and eventually settled in Oklahoma, in the United States.
Nayeri's first novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, was published in 2014 by Riverhead Books (Penguin) and translated into 14 languages.
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.
As attested by a personal essay[4] published in The New Yorker, many of Niloo's circumstances and adventures, including the four visits with her father, are modeled closely on real events in the author's life.
She worked in New York City as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and later as a strategic manager at Saks Fifth Avenue.