Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian fiction writer living in the United States.

Hemon was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1964, to Ukrainian father and Serbian mother. He graduated from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990. After moving to Chicago in 1992 with little English, and finding himself unable to write in his native Bosnian, he set a goal for himself that required him to learn English within five years.

In 1995, he began to write in English. His work was soon published in prestigious magazines - including The New Yorker, Esquire, and the Paris Review - and in 2000 a book of stories and a novella, The Question of Bruno, was published. His first novel, Nowhere Man, followed in 2002. Nowhere Man concerns Jozef Pronek, the hero of one of the stories in The Question of Bruno, and there are other connections as well.

As a virtuoso adult learner of English, Hemon has some similarities to Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, 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" Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.

Hemon has a bi-weekly column called "Hemonwood" that he writes in Bosnian language for a magazine BH Dani (BH Days) in Sarajevo.

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