Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo and earned his BA from the University of Sarajevo and MA from Northwestern University. As a journalist, he traveled to Chicago in 1992 on a cultural visa. Although he intended to stay a few months, the Bosnian War made his return to Sarajevo impossible and he settled in Chicago, where he learned English and began to write. He wrote his first story in English in 1995. He is the author of the novels The Lazarus Project (2008), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nowhere Man (2002), also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Making of Zombie Wars (2016). His other works include the short story collections The Question of Bruno (2002) and Love and Other Obstacles (2009) and the nonfiction works The Book of My Lives (2013), which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the double memoir My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong To You (2019). Hemon has also written journalism, screenplays, and for the Netflix series Sens8.

Hemon’s honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. He has taught at Northwestern University and New York University. He is currently professor of creative writing at Princeton University.