Aleksandar Hemon was born in 1964, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. He came to the US as part of a month long cultural exchange program of journalists and was supposed to return to Sarajevo on May 1st 1992, the same day that Sarajevo came under siege so was instead granted political asylum in the US. Hemon began writing fiction in English in 1995 and one of the first stories he wrote in English, “Islands”, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1999 (ed. Amy Tan). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. From 2010 to 2013 he served as editor of Best European Fiction anthologies (Dalkey Archives).

Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project and his latest short story collection, Love and Obstacles was published in May 2009. His collection of auto-biographical essays, The Book of My Lives, is forthcoming from Farrar Straus and Giroux in the fall of 2012. He is at work on his next novel.

Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia