Aleksandar Hemon: About a Youth

The talk with the author will be hosted by Dr. Svetlana Slapšak 

Aleksandar Hemon (born 1964, Sarajevo) is a Bosnian-American writer, essayist, critic, and screenwriter. He graduated from the University of Sarajevo, and earned his Master's degree from Northwestern University in 1996. He has lived in the United States since 1992. Hemon is best known for his novels Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008) and his scriptwriting as a co-writer of The Matrix Resurrections (2021). An award-winning author, 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 currently a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. He is also a musician, distributing his Electronica work under the pseudonym “Cielo Hemon”.

Hemon's books that have been translated into Slovenian include Projekt Lazar (2010, Modrijan), Knjiga mojih življenj (Modrijan, 2013), Vprašanje Bruna (Goga, 2019) and To ni zate (Goga, 2023). All works have been translated by Irena Duša.

Aleksandar Hemon’s earliest childhood memories include mainly cinema and films, especially the first movie he saw, The Battle of Neretva. His father, an expert for Energoinvest, travelled extensively, and Aleksandar and his family also lived in Zaire, Africa. Like many other families, Aleksandar’s had a holiday cottage in Jahorina, where his father would always find some unavoidable chore instead of practising the art of slow living: the children, on the other hand, preferred to stay in Sarajevo over the weekends to attend parties. A member of a rock band, Aleksandar was making music videos with his father’s camera. He later worked for the Omladinski Radio in Sarajevo – where he developed a lifelong love of music, later pursuing an extensive career as a DJ. Writing came after many years of being a journalist...

Svetlana Slapšak is an anthropologist and Doctor of Ancient Studies whose academic career has taken her to numerous European and American universities. Lecturer at ISH (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis) and Dean at the Faculty of Postgraduate Humanist Studies in Ljubljana (2003–13), she is the author of over 70 books, scientific studies, collections of essays, translations, novels, plays, librettos, travelogues and children's books, around 400 scientific studies and over 2000 essays.