Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon (b. 1964) was born on 9 September 1964 in Sarajevo, then part of Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina. He grew up in a middle-class family, studied literature at the University of Sarajevo, and worked as a journalist. In January 1992 he travelled to Chicago on a cultural exchange programme. While he was there, the siege of Sarajevo began. He could not return. His city was destroyed; his family was trapped under bombardment; and Hemon — suddenly an exile in a country whose language he barely spoke — began the process of becoming an American writer.

Life and Career

Hemon taught himself English by immersion — reading voraciously, listening, writing. Within a few years he was publishing stories in English in The New Yorker, Esquire, and Ploughshares. His debut collection, The Question of Bruno (2000), announced a distinctive voice: layered, ironic, simultaneously funny and devastating, navigating between Sarajevo and Chicago, memory and present.

Nowhere Man (2002) is a novel told in interconnected stories, following a Bosnian immigrant through Chicago while excavating the Sarajevo past that haunts him. The Lazarus Project (2008), his most ambitious novel, intercuts two narratives: the investigation of a real 1908 Chicago police killing of a Jewish immigrant and a contemporary Bosnian-American writer’s journey through Eastern Europe. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Book of My Lives (2013) is a memoir-in-essays, including the devastating piece “The Aquarium” about the death of his infant daughter from a brain tumour — one of the most wrenching pieces of personal writing published in the twenty-first century.

The World and All That It Holds (2023), his most recent novel, is an epic spanning the twentieth century, following a Bosnian Sephardic Jew and a Ukrainian soldier from Sarajevo in World War I through Shanghai, to eventual refuge in America.

Hemon is also a screenwriter, having worked on the Wachowskis’ Sense8 and The Matrix Resurrections. He teaches at Princeton University.

Major Works and Themes

Hemon’s central subject is displacement — the experience of living between languages, cultures, and identities, of carrying a destroyed homeland in memory while building a life in a new country. His work is animated by the tension between the desire to tell the truth about war, loss, and exile and the inadequacy of any narrative to contain those experiences.

The Lazarus Project (2008) is his finest achievement — a novel that weaves past and present, photography and fiction, America and Europe into a meditation on violence, immigration, and the stories people construct to survive.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Hemon is widely admired by critics and fellow writers — he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004 — but has not achieved wide commercial success. His work is essential reading for anyone interested in immigrant fiction, war literature, or the creative possibilities of writing in an adopted language.

Key Works

• The Question of Bruno (2000)
• Nowhere Man (2002)
• The Lazarus Project (2008)
• Love and Obstacles (2009)
• The Book of My Lives (2013)
• The Making of Zombie Wars (2015)
• My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You (2019)
• The World and All That It Holds (2023)

Collecting Hemon

Hemon’s books had modest print runs, and first editions are increasingly sought by collectors of literary fiction and immigrant literature.

The Question of Bruno (2000, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, New York) is his debut and the most desirable title. First editions in jacket bring $100–$400.

The Lazarus Project (2008, Riverhead Books) — a National Book Award finalist — is sought at $75–$250 for fine first editions.

Hemon signs at readings and academic events. Signed copies are available but not abundant.