Background

Aleksandar Hemon was born on September 9, 1964, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia. He is a son of Petar Hemon and Andja Zivkovic. His great-grandfather was Teodor Hemon.

Education

In October 1983, at the age of nineteen, Aleksandar Hemon was conscripted into the Yugoslav People's Army. He served in the infantry in Stip, a town in eastern Macedonia that was home to both the military barracks and a bubble-gum factory.

Aleksandar Hemon received a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from the University of Sarajevo in 1990. He visited Chicago in 1992 as a part of a journalism exchange program, intending to stay for just a few months. However, he was unable to return home because of the Bosnian War. Hemon sought asylum in the United States as a political refugee, and his application was accepted. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1995 with a Master of Arts degree, simultaneously working a series of jobs while continuing to learn English. He began pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Loyola University in 1997.

Career

At the beginning of his career, Aleksandar Hemon worked variously including two years of door-to-door fundraising for Greenpeace, during which time he estimates he spoke with 5,000 people. He also worked as a journalist, kitchen worker, bicycle messenger, Greenpeace canvasser, bookstore clerk, and teacher. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He is a contributor to publications, including Ploughshares, New Yorker, Grantci, Esquire, Triquarterly, and Baffler, and a bi-weekly column for the Sarajevo magazine, Bhdani.

The Question of Bruno, Hemon's first English-language offering, consists of seven short stories and a novella. At a time when so much new fiction in English centers around the metropolitan adventures of trendy twenty/thirty-somethings in London/New York, Hemon's stories turn over a very different side of life - full of fear, isolation, brutality, and bloodshed. The opening story, "Islands," is about a young boy who visits his uncle on an island where mongooses imported to eliminate snakes are also killing the domestic animals. "The Sorge Spy Ring" contains photographs and details about real-life Soviet spy Richard Sorge. The story "A Coin" is a series of undelivered, perhaps unwritten letters, between the Chicago expatriate and Aida, who edits film for the foreign television crews in Sarajevo. In Review of Contemporary Fiction, Paul Maliszewski pointed out that Hemon has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, both of whom wrote in English as a second language. Scott Blackwood wrote in the Austin Chronicle that "in Hemon's stories, as in Kafka's, fantasy and suffering are intertwined."

But if the terrain of many of Hemon's stories is the banal cartography of war, the substance is often fantastical. "The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders" is a bullet-point biography of a Yugoslavian Zelig, bee-keeper, photographer, and statesman, each "fact" of whose life is more outlandish than the last. In the novella "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls," the barely sketched exile with an unforgettable voice becomes a longer but not well fleshed-out version. Jozef Pronek has escaped the siege of Sarajevo and watches his homeland burn on CNN. The reader sees America through Pronek's eyes, as when he is at JFK Airport and pictures it shaped like John F. Kennedy's "supine body, with his legs and arms outstretched, and leechlike airplanes sucking its toes and fingers." Pronek lives on Snickers and Twinkies and greets the cockroaches in his apartment when he returns home from work. "Blind Jozef Pronek" is a critique of a layer of American culture. This self-contained, bourgeois, ahistorical layer. Hemon brings back Josef Pronek in the 2002 novel, Nowhere Man. The novel follows Pronek through adolescence and his formation of a rock band, to his move to Chicago shortly before war erupts in Yugoslavia. In Chicago, Pronek struggles to adapt to American life - finding odd jobs and living with his father.

In 2011, Aleksandar Hemon and his wife, Teri Boyd, founded Chicago Literary Salon. Even with his prolific output as a regular in The New Yorker as well as an essayist on his beloved soccer in venues worldwide, not to mention the promotional demands, Hemon is a regular presence at the salon, holding court with other writers, some boldfaced like him, others very much on the up-and-come.

In 2018, Aleksandar Hemon joined the Lewis Center for Art's Program in Creative Writing faculty at Princeton University. He was appointed a Professor of Creative Writing and is teaching undergraduate creative writing workshops, including "Introduction to Fiction" and "Advanced Fiction." He has also taught at Northwestern University and New York University.

Achievements

• Aleksandar Hemon has achieved widespread acclaim for his writings in his adopted language of English, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, which celebrated Hemon for dramatizing with wit and dexterity the cultural displacement that he and his characters have endured. His books received many awards and nominations. His voice invigorates American literature and succeeds in conveying moving stories from the otherwise incommunicable experience of war. Hemon was named one of the twenty-one writers for the twenty-first century by the London Observer.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Love and Obstacles

    (The stories of Aleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles are ...)

    2009
  • The Lazarus Project

    (On March 2, 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, an ...)

    2008
  • The Question of Bruno

    (The Question of Bruno is an elegy for the vanished Yugosl...)

    2000
  • Nowhere Man

    (A love affair is experienced in the blink of an eye as Ar...)

    2002
  • The Book of My Lives

    (The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon's first book of no...)

    2013
  • The Making of Zombie Wars

    (Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching ESL class...)

    2015

Views

Quotations: "I love books more than ever. Because I learned that books don't represent "truth." Rather they open a space, a public space, in which that truth can be negotiated. With books you are never alone, never isolated."

"The thing with English is that its borders can be pushed. It can be transformed and recharged. At the same time, because it is so fluid, so limitless, people feel that the rules and idiomatic strictness must be enforced - otherwise the foreigners will take the language away. It often happens that reviewers, even those who like my books, give me a little lecture in their review about the way I use language - "this is not the way we say it," they suggest. Though I screw up an idiom or misuse a word here and there, I do not care all that much about how "we" say it."

Membership

• 

  PEN America , United States

Interests

• cinema

• Writers

  Vladimir Nabokov

• Sport & Clubs

  soccer

Connections

Aleksandar Hemon's first wife was Lisa Stodder, a freelance journalist. They married in 1998. His second wife is Teri Boyd. They have two daughters, Ella and Esther. Their second daughter, Isabel, died in 2010.

Father:

Petar Hemon

Mother:

Andja Zivkovic

late daughter:

Isabel Hemon

Isabel Hemon was only nine months old when she was diagnosed with atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor (ATRT), a particularly malignant kind of brain cancer. From the onset her prognosis was grim. She suffered through multiple surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy in her hometown of Chicago before finally dying three short months later. Aleksandar Hemon wrote about her in a piece he called "The Aquarium" in The New Yorker. Isabel's illness, he says, made him feel as if he were living behind glass: visible yet separate from the rest of the ordinary world.

Daughter:

Ella Hemon

Great-grandfather:

Teodor Hemon

ex-wife:

Lisa Stodder

Wife:

Teri Boyd

References

• Aleksandar Hemon