Aleksandar Hemon

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

Hemon graduated from the University of Sarajevo and was a published writer in former Yugoslavia by the time he was 26.

Since 1992 he has lived in the United States, where he found himself as a tourist and became stranded at the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. where he lives with his second wife, Teri Boyd, and their daughters Ella and Esther. The couple's second child, 1-year-old daughter Isabel, died of complications associated with a brain tumor in November 2010. He is also a supporter of Liverpool Football Club.

In June 2006, Exchange of Pleasant Words and A Coin were published by Picador.

On 1 May 2008, Hemon released The Lazarus Project, inspired by the story of Lazarus Averbuch, which featured photographs by Hemon's childhood friend, photographer Velibor Božović. The novel was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named as a "New York Times Notable Book" and New York magazine's No. 1 Book of the Year.

In May 2009, Hemon released a collection of stories, Love and Obstacles,

In 2019, he published My Parents: An Introduction. This and This Does Not Belong to You actually makes two "discrete but complementary" works of nonfiction, his second and third, and concerns the "nature of storytelling, memory, history and homeland": Thematically, My Parents: An Introduction is organized family memoir, while This Does Not Belong to You is "fragmentary reminiscences" of author’s own "Bosnian childhood".

On August 20, 2019, it was announced that Hemon would co-write the script for The Matrix Resurrections alongside David Mitchell and Lana Wachowski. The film was released on December 22, 2021.

His latest novel The World and All That it Holds was published on February 2, 2023. It was the winner of the 2023 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, which honors the best American novel translated into French and published in France. (The book was published in France as Un monde de ciel et de terre by Calmann-Lévy, translated by Michèle Albaret-Maatsch.)

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In October 2019, Hemon joined many intellectuals in an international public outcry against the decision of the Nobel Committee to award Peter Handke a Nobel Prize in Literature earlier that month (they opposed the award because of Handke's support of the late Slobodan Milošević and the author's Bosnian genocide denial). Hemon wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times, published October 15, criticizing the Nobel committee for its decision.

Critical reception 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, though he is most frequently compared to Vladimir Nabokov. All of his stories deal in some way with the Yugoslav Wars, Bosnia, or Chicago, but they vary substantially in genre.

Awards 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Grant For Literary Oral History, for How Did You Get Here?: Tales of Displacement 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography) shortlist for The Book of My Lives 2012 United States Artists Fellow Award. 2012 National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism, for "The Aquarium" 2011 PEN/W.G. Sebald Award 2011 Premio Gregor von Rezzori for foreign fiction translated into Italian for The Lazarus Project (Il Progetto Lazarus), translated by Maurizia Balmelli (Einaudi) 2009 National Magazine Award for Fiction, for The New Yorker 2009 St. Francis College Literary Prize 2008 National Book Award, finalist, for The Lazarus Project 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award, finalist, for The Lazarus Project 2004 MacArthur Fellows Program from the MacArthur Foundation 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, finalist, for Nowhere Man 2001 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, for The Question of Bruno

Selected bibliography Novels 2002 Nowhere Man, , 2008 The Lazarus Project, , 2015 The Making of Zombie Wars, , 2023 The World and All That It Holds, ,

Short story collections 2000 The Question of Bruno, 2009 Love and Obstacles. Riverhead Books.

Nonfiction 2013 The Book of My Lives, 2019 My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You.

Essays 2014 "The Matters of Life, Death, and More: Writing on Soccer", 2015 "My Prisoner",

Short fiction "The Liar," collected in The Book of Other People (Zadie Smith, editor) "The Conductor," collected in The Best American Short Stories 2006 (Ann Patchett, editor); first published in The New Yorker, February 28, 2005

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Editor 2010 Best European Fiction 2010 2010 Best European Fiction 2011 2011 Best European Fiction 2012 2012 Best European Fiction 2013