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Biography
Bosnian-American

Aleksander Hemon

1964

A Bosnian-American novelist and essayist whose work explores exile, displacement, and the immigrant experience with a linguistic inventiveness and dark humour that have drawn comparisons to Nabokov and Bellow. Stranded in Chicago by the siege of Sarajevo, he reinvented himself as an English-language writer and produced some of the most distinctive fiction of the early twenty-first century.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityBosnian-American
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Aleksandar Hemon was born on 9 September 1964 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina). He was visiting Chicago on a cultural exchange programme in 1992 when the siege of Sarajevo began, stranding him in the United States. He taught himself to write fiction in English — his third language after Bosnian and German — with remarkable speed and fluency.

Life and Career

The Question of Bruno (2000), his debut story collection, announced a major talent. The stories moved between wartime Sarajevo and immigrant Chicago with a voice that combined Nabokovian wordplay, Bosnian dark humour, and the bewildered precision of someone describing a new country in a new language. Nowhere Man (2002), a novel-in-stories, followed a Bosnian immigrant through multiple identities and continents.

The Lazarus Project (2008), his most ambitious novel, interleaved two narratives: a contemporary Bosnian-American writer travelling through Eastern Europe, and the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant shot by the Chicago chief of police in 1908. The novel explored the American treatment of immigrants across a century with formal daring and moral force. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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

Hemon has also worked as a screenwriter and television writer, contributing to The Matrix Resurrections (2021) and the Netflix series Sense8. He teaches at Princeton University.

Key Works

  • The Question of Bruno (2000)
  • Nowhere Man (2002)
  • The Lazarus Project (2008)
  • The Book of My Lives (2013)
  • The World and All That It Holds (2023)

Collecting Hemon

The Question of Bruno (2000, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) is the debut first edition and brings $30–$100 in fine condition. The Lazarus Project (2008, Riverhead) brings $20–$60 for fine firsts. Hemon is a frequent presence at literary festivals and signs willingly. His work occupies a distinctive position — a Bosnian exile writing in English about displacement, identity, and the impossibility of going home — that gives it lasting literary and historical value.