Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir

FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNER GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NON-FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 EVERGREEN AWARD
AN AUDIBLE BEST BOOK OF 2024

A queer Syrian refugee reckons with a life spent out of place.

“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.

Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.

What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative—a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalences. Written with fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth is a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own.

DANNY RAMADAN (he/him) is a Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker, and advocate for LGBTQ+ refugees. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, was longlisted for Canada Reads and named a Best Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star. His second novel, The Foghorn Echoes, won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Vancouver Book Award. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and currently lives in Vancouver with his husband.

ISBN: 9780735242210
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: May 28, 2024

FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNER GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NON-FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 EVERGREEN AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 HUBERT EVANS NON-FICTION PRIZE

One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year

PRAISE FOR CROOKED TEETH: