Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon (born September 9, 1964) is a Bosnian-born American fiction writer, essayist, and critic. His best known novels are Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008). 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. 2Early life Hemon was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia, to a father of partial Ukrainian and Bosnian descent and a Bosnian 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. 2Biography 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 is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation grant. 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 1996 and "Islands" in Ploughshares in 1998, and eventually "Blind Jozef Pronek" in The New Yorker in 199