Aleksandar Hemon: This Does Not Belong To You

This Does Not Belong To You is a novel about memories. A novel piecing together fragments of memories of Aleksandar Hemon’s childhood, a time when everything was still possible, when the future had not yet happened, and Sarajevo seemed to be an eternal city. The narrator looks back at the past with warm melancholy, reviving its material realities, children's games, loves and misunderstandings, friendships, as well as the cruelty born out of a sense of immortality. Literature, says Hemon, saves from oblivion, perhaps even keeping alive people, events, and places through eternalizing them on paper. I could have been a different person, someone who would never hurt a fly. Instead, here we are, Hemon, you and I.

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”.

The talk with the author will be hosted by Ervin Hladnik Milharčič.

The event will be held in Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian with translation into Slovenian.

In cooperation with Založba Goga
 

Pogovor bo potekal v bosanščini in srbohrvaščini s prevodom v slovenščino.