Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon (Serbian Cyrillic: Александар Xeмoн; born September 9, 1964) is a Bosnian-American author, essayist, critic, television writer, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008), and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections (2021).

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.

Hemon is also a musician, distributing his Electronica work under the pseudonym "Cielo Hemon." 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 earned his master's degree from Northwestern University in 1996.

He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2004.

He published his first story in English, "The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders" in Triquarterly in 1995, followed by "The Sorge Spy Ring," also in Triquarterly in 1996, "A Coin" in Chicago Review in 1997, "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 is currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where he lives with his second wife, Teri Boyd, and their daughters Ella and Esther. 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.

Hemon grew up near the Grbavica Stadium, and he is a supporter of the Željo, as the Sarajevo based football club FK Željezničar is affectionately called, with a membership. He is also a supporter of Liverpool Football Club.