Aleksandar Hemon: When a Mother Tongue Stops Being Enough

Chosen Tongue

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, as well as The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, The Book of My Lives, The Making of Zombie Wars, as well as a couple of non-fiction books. His most recent novel is The World and All That It Holds (2023)

Aleksandar Hemon has worked as a writer for Radio Sarajevo Youth Program, and then as a waiter, canvasser, bookseller, bike messenger, as well as a supervisor at a literacy center, and a teacher of English as a second language (all in Chicago). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times, Playboy, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, Ploughshares and The Paris Review, among others. He’s written for film and television, most recently The Matrix Resurrections. He produces and releases music as Cielo Hemon. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the PEN/ W.G. Sebald Award, a USA Fellowship, PEN/Jean Stein Oral History Grant etc. He has taught at Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champagne, Columbia College Chicago, University of Chicago, New York University. He finally settled at Princeton University, where he teaches now.

We discussed the changes a second language brings to the author's voice and perspective, as well as Hemon's connection to his native Sarajevo and how he translates the city for a foreign audience. Hemon also shared his experience of writing columns in Bosnian as a diasporic person and how writers should allow themselves to write in as many languages as they wish because languages are superpowers.