Aleksandar Hemon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aleksandar Hemon (born 1964) is a Bosnian fiction writer living in the United States.

Hemon was born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, to a father of Ukrainian descent and Serbian mother. Hemon's great-grandfather, Teodor Hemon, came to Bosnia from Western Ukraine prior to World War I, when both countries were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Hemon graduated from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990. After moving to Chicago in 1992 knowing little English, and finding himself unable to write in his native Bosnian, he resolved to learn English within five years.

In 1995, he began to write in English, and his work soon appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In 2000 Hemon published his first book, The Question of Bruno, which included short stories and a novella. His first novel, Nowhere Man, followed in 2002. Nowhere Man concerns Jozef Pronek, a character who earlier appeared in one of the stories in The Question of Bruno.

As an accomplished fiction writer who learned English as an adult, Hemon has some similarities to Joseph Conrad, which he acknowledges through allusion in The Question of Bruno. All of his stories deal in some way with the Yugoslav wars, Bosnia, or Chicago, but they vary substantially in genre.

Hemon was awarded a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.

Hemon has a bi-weekly column called "Hemonwood" in the Sarajevo-based magazine, BH Dani (BH Days).