VJ Books presents Aleksandar Hemon!

Hemon was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Yugoslavia, to a father of Ukrainian descent and Serbian mother. Hemon's great-grandfather, Teodor Hemon, came to Bosnia from Western Ukraine prior to World War I, when both countries were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Hemon graduated from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990. After moving to Chicago in 1992 knowing little English, and finding himself unable to write in his native Bosnian, he resolved to learn English within five years.

In 1995, he began to write in English, and his work soon appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. In 2000 Hemon published his first book, The Question of Bruno, which included short stories and a novella. His first novel, Nowhere Man, followed in 2002. Nowhere Man concerns Jozef Pronek, a character who earlier appeared in one of the stories in The Question of Bruno.

As an accomplished fiction writer who learned English as an adult, Hemon has some similarities to Joseph Conrad, which he acknowledges through allusion in The Question of Bruno. All of his stories deal in some way with the Yugoslav wars, Bosnia, or Chicago, but they vary substantially in genre.

Hemon was awarded a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004, and has a bi-weekly column called "Hemonwood" in the Sarajevo-based magazine, BH Dani. His latest novel, The Lazarus Project, released in May 2008, is a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. He wrote an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times on July 27, 2008 entitled Genocide's Epic Hero which discusses the capture of Radovan Karadzic. Hemon’s next book, Love and Obstacles,will be published in 2009.

He lives with his second wife, Teri Boyd, in Chicago with their daughter, Ella.