Aleksandar Hemon: ‘A book isn’t a car – not everything has to work’
Aleksandar Hemon, 58, was born in Sarajevo and lives in New Jersey. His diverse output includes The Lazarus Project (2008), a novel drawing on the 1908 shooting of a Jewish migrant by Chicago police; the autobiographical essay collection The Book of My (2013), which discusses the death of Hemon’s second child; and the screenplay for , co-written with Lana Wachowski and David Mitchell. His new book, , is a century-spanning, cross-continental polyglot gay romance between two conscripts, one Jewish, one Muslim, who fall in love fighting the first world war in central Europe. Hemon spoke from his office at Princeton University, where he has been teaching creative writing since 2018.
