Aleksandar Hemon (born September 9, 1964, Sarajevo,Yugoslavia [now in Bosnia and Herzegovina]) is a Bosnian American writer known for his short stories and novels that explore issues ofexile, identity, and home through characters drawn from Hemon’s own experience as an immigrant.

Hemon was raised inSarajevo, where his father was an engineer and his mother was an accountant. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo with a degree inliterature in 1990, he worked as a journalist with the Sarajevan youth press. In 1992 he participated in a journalist exchange program that took him toChicago. Hemon intended to stay in theUnited States only briefly, for the duration of the program, but, whenwar broke out in his home country, he applied for and was granted status as a political refugee in the United States.

In Chicago Hemon worked a series of jobs, including as a bike messenger and a door-to-door canvasser, while improving his knowledge of English and pursuing a graduate degree atNorthwestern University. Three years after arriving in the United States, he wrote his firstshort story in English, “The Sorge Spy Ring.” Together with several other short stories and the novella “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls,” it was published in the collectionThe Question of Bruno in 2000, the same year Hemon became an American citizen. Like much of Hemon’s published work, these stories were largely informed by Hemon’s own immigrant experience in Chicago. Hemon brought back Jozef Pronek, theprotagonist from his earlier novella, withNowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies (2002), the story of a young man growing up in Sarajevo who later attempts to navigate a new life in Chicago while working minimum-wage jobs. The book, like the rest of Hemon’s work, was notable for the author’s inventive use of theEnglish language. He was awarded aMacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2004.

The Lazarus Project (2008) intertwined two stories of eastern European immigrants to Chicago. Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian immigrant writer and thenovel’s narrator, becomes obsessed with a murder case from nearly a century earlier in which Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jew, was shot and killed by Chicago’s police chief. Hemon received much critical acclaim for the novel, which was a finalist for aNational Book Award. He followed this withLove and Obstacles (2009), a collection of short stories narrated by a young man who leaves Sarajevo for the United States when war breaks out in his home country.The Making of Zombie Wars (2015) chronicles thequotidian difficulties of a workaday writer attempting to finish a screenplay about a zombie invasion.

Hemon also cowrote the screenplay forThe Matrix Resurrections (2021), the fourth installment in the popular sci-fi Matrix series. His other works included the memoirsThe Book of My Lives (2013) andMy Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (2019). The latter book consists of two volumes.