Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon is coming to Slovenia, with his first stop set to be Nova Gorica, followed by Ljubljana and Novo mesto. On Tuesday, December 5, on the occasion of the publication of the Slovenian translation of his book Tole ni zate/ All this does not belong to you, he will talk with journalist Ervin Hladnik Milharčič. The presentation will be held in bosniac language with simultaneous translation into Slovenian and Italian at Library France Bevk (Trg Edvarda Kardelja 4).

Through his novel "All This Doesn't Belong to You," Aleksandar Hemon recounts his upbringing in Sarajevo in the late 1960s and 1970s in the form of memory fragments and glimpses.

Aleksandar Hemon (b. 1964) is a man of two cities: he spent his childhood and youth in Sarajevo before moving as a refugee to Chicago, U.S., in 1992, at the outbreak of the Bosnian War. He was not ready to stay in America; he had no money, no job, and no connections. He lived there for a few years, then decided to learn English so well that he could write. He began to publish, until an agent in New York read his story in one of the newspapers and decided to take over his career. She sold her story to the prestigious New Yorker magazine and the book to a publisher. Since then he has had a good literary career in America. His collection of short stories, The Question of Bruno (2000), received excellent reviews and was translated into many foreign languages. His second book, the genre novel Nowhere Man (2002), further solidified his reputation as an author, while The Lazarus Project (2008) made him world famous.

He has ventured into virtually every literary genre. Finally, he has also worked on film and television scripts. In recent years he has successfully collaborated with Lana Wachowski, film artist and author of the sci-fi dystopia Matrix: first for the script of the TV series Sense8 and in 2021, together with screenwriter David Mitchell, he signed the fourth chapter of the Matrix.

Alexander Hemon's presence in Slovenia is organized by Goga Publishing House as part of the European cooperation project Realis, co-financed by the European Union's Creative Europe Program. The event is part of the "Think Tank Train" project, included in the candidacy book of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica - Gorica and the Festival City of Books. The festival program is co-financed by the Slovenian Book Agency and the Municipality of Nova Gorica.

(Picture: Andraž Gombač)