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 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,[5] 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.[6] He is also a supporter of Liverpool Football Club.
Works
In 2000 Hemon published his first book, The Question of Bruno, which included short stories and a novella.
His second book, Nowhere Man, followed in 2002. Variously referred to as a novel and as a collection of linked stories, Nowhere Man concerns Jozef Pronek, a character who earlier appeared in one of the stories in The Question of Bruno. It was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.
In June 2006, Exchange of Pleasant Words and A Coin were published by Picador.[7]
His latest novel The World and All That it Holds was published on February 2, 2023. It was the winner of the 2023 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, which honors the best American novel translated into French and published in France. (The book was published in France as Un monde de ciel et de terre by Calmann-Lévy, translated by Michèle Albaret-Maatsch.)[12]
Articles
Perhaps the esteemed Nobel Committee is so invested in the preservation of Western civilization that to it a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim lives. (...) For them, genocide comes and goes, but literature is forever.
^ abHemon, Aleksandar (October 15, 2019). "Opinion - 'The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists'". The New York Times. Retrieved May 17, 2020. Perhaps the esteemed Nobel Committee is so invested in the preservation of Western civilization that to it a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim lives. Or it could be that in the rarefied chambers in Stockholm, Mr. Handke's anxious goalie is far more real than a woman from Srebrenica whose family was eradicated in the massacre. The choice of Mr. Handke implies a concept of literature safe from the infelicities of history and actualities of human life and death. War and genocide, Milosevic and Srebrenica, the value of the writer's words and actions at this moment in history, might be of interest to the unsophisticated plebs once subjected to murder and displacement, but not to those who can appreciate 'linguistic ingenuity' that 'has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.' For them, genocide comes and goes, but literature is forever.
