Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon
Born	September 9, 1964 (1964-09-09) Sarajevo, SFR Yugoslavia
Occupation	Short story writer, novelist and columnist
Nationality	Bosnian / American
Alma mater	University of Sarajevo, Northwestern University
Period	2000–present
Literary movement	Postmodernism
Notable work(s)	The Lazarus Project (2008)
Influences Danilo Kiš, Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald
www.aleksandarhemon.com

Aleksandar Hemon (born September 9, 1964) is a Bosnian-American fiction writer. He is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation grant. He has written four acclaimed books: Love and Obstacles: Stories (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), The Lazarus Project: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and was named as a New York Times Notable Book and New York magazine's #1 Book of the Year; Nowhere Man (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002), also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Question of Bruno: Stories (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2000). He frequently publishes in The New Yorker, and has also written for Esquire, The Paris Review, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, and the Sarajevo magazine BH Dani.

Biography

Hemon was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia, to a father of Ukrainian descent and Bosnian Serb 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 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. In the U.S. he worked as a Greenpeace canvasser, sandwich assembly-line worker, bike messenger, graduate student in English literature, bookstore salesperson, and ESL teacher.

He published his first story in English, "The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders" in Triquarterly in 1995, followed "The Sorge Spy Ring," also in [Triquarterly] in 1997 and "Islands" in Ploughshares in 1998, and eventually "Blind Jozef Pronek" in The New Yorker in 1999. His work also eventually appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. Hemon also has a bi-weekly column, written and published in Bosnian, called "Hemonwood" in the Sarajevo-based magazine, BH Dani (BH Days).

Hemon lives with his second wife, Teri Boyd, and their daughter Ella in Chicago. The couple's second child, 1-year-old daughter Isabel, died of complications associated with a brain tumor in November 2010. Hemon published an essay, "The Aquarium," about Isabel's death in the June 13/20, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.

Works

In 2000 Hemon published his first book, The Question of Bruno, which included short stories and a novella, to overwhelmingly positive reviews.

His second book, Nowhere Man, followed in 2002. Variously referred to as a novel and as a collection of linked stories, Nowhere Man concerns Jozef Pronek, a character who earlier appeared in one of the stories in The Question of Bruno. It was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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

In May 2008, Hemon released The Lazarus Project, which featured photographs by Hemon's childhood friend, photographer Velibor Božović. The novel was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award[2] and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.

In May 2009, Hemon released a collection of stories, Love and Obstacles, which were largely written at the same time as he wrote The Lazarus Project.

Short fiction

• "The Liar", collected in The Book of Other People (Zadie Smith, editor)
• "Love and obstacles". The New Yorker 81 (38). 2005-11-28. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/28/051128fi_fiction. Retrieved 20 October 2010. 
• "The noble truths of suffering". The New Yorker 84 (29). 2009-09-22. http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/09/22/080922fi_fiction_hemon. Retrieved 20 October 2010. 

Articles

• "A shining monument of loss". Granta 103: 29–31. Autumn 2008. http://www.granta.com/Magazine/Granta-103/Subject-Object/Page-1. Retrieved 20 October 2010. 
• "If God existed, He'd be a solid midfielder". Granta 108. Autumn 2009. 

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

• National Magazine Award for Fiction for The New Yorker in 2009.
• St. Francis College Literary Prize in 2009.
• Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.
• "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.
• Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003.
• Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003.
• John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares in 2001.

External links

• Official website
• Hemon's page on U.S. publisher's website Riverhead Books
• Hemon, Aleksandar. "The Noble Truths of Suffering" National Magazine Award-winning New Yorker story
• Hemon, Aleksandar "Genocide’s Epic Hero" New York Times Op-Ed on Radovan Karadžić
• Hemon, Aleksandar "Rationed"