Aleksander Hemon was born in Sarajevo and now lives in New Jersey. 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 Bosnian war. 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 earned his master’s degrees from Northwestern University in 1996. His diverse output includes ‘The Lazarus Project’, 2008, a novel drawing on the 1908 shooting of a Jewish migrant by Chicago police; the autobiographical essay collection ‘The Book of My Lives’, 2013, which discusses the death of Hemon’s second child; and the screenplay for ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ co-written with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell. His new book, ‘The World and All That It Holds’, is a century-spanning, cross-continental polyglot gay romance between two conscripts, one Jewish, one Muslim, who fall in love fighting the first world war in central Europe. Hemon now works at Princeton University, where he has been teaching creative writing since 2018. 

Events participated in:

The World and All That It Holds: Join Allan Little and celebrated author Aleksandar Hemon as they explore his new novel The World and All That it Holds, which takes the reader on a mesmerising journey from Sarajevo to Shanghai. They will also reflect onthe former Yugoslavia 25 years on. (2023)