Danny Ramadan

Danny Ramadan (he/him) is a Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker, and advocate for LGBTQ+ refugees. His memoir Crooked Teeth is nominated for a 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. 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 a 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 lives in Vancouver with his husband.

Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir

“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.

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Author, activist Danny Ramadan hopes his memoir will change you. –CBC

Danny Ramadan talks Crooked Teeth. –The Social

Calls to ban books are on the rise in Canada. So is the opposition to any bans. –CBC

Danny Ramadan

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Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir