Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia- Herzegovina, where he succcesfully lived until he ended up in Chicago in 1992. He loved the damned city of Sarajevo and still does: once you have seen all the mosques of Sarajevo at Ramadan lighting up at the same time, after a cannon declares that the sun has set and the fast is over, there is no way of getting over it.

Upon his arrival in the US of A, he had all kinds of lousy jobs, including, but not limited to, canvassing for Greenpeace and teaching English as a Second Language to the people who suddenly found their First Language nearly perfectly useless. During the Greenpeace phase, he found himself at a suburban door, facing a woman who said: “I thought you were someone elese,” whereupon he responded: “I am someone else.” During the ESL phase he found himself forced to teach irregular plurals: goose--geese, ox--oxen, to a classroom of desparate students who were hoping to get a job or indeed find a home. He did not manage to convince himself that his students would benefit from using the correct plural, were they ever to run into a herd of oxen or a gaggle of geese in the streets of Chicago.

Then he acquired an MA degree in English from Northwestern and dropped the pursuit of a PhD at Loyola University the moment he sold his book The Question of Bruno (2000). Then he wrote Nowhere Man (2002). The two books have been published in twenty different languages (rather than twenty identical languages). His stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Baffler, Granta, Esquire, The Paris Review etc and in the Best American Short Stories 1999 and 2000. He writes a column in Bosnian, under the unfortunate title Hemonwood, for the Sarajevo magazine Dani, and a selection of those columns has been published in Bosnia a couple of years ago.

He is a Guggenheim, MacArthur and decent fellow. He lives in Chicago with the woman he loves and two dogs, and plays soccer with fellow immigrants at least once a week. He frequently crosses borders, which he hates.

Additional Resources: Aleksandar's  Video Remarks