Andre Aciman

Alexandria is the city André Aciman's family had to leave. Born there on 2 January 1951 into a Sephardic Jewish household that spoke French at home alongside Italian, Ladino, Greek and Arabic, he departed with his family in 1965, lived in Rome, and reached New York in 1968. Out of Egypt (1995), his memoir of that vanished world, won a Whiting Award. He took a doctorate at Harvard and teaches literary theory and the work of Marcel Proust at the CUNY Graduate Center. Call Me by Your Name (2007) put a seventeen-year-old and a visiting scholar together for one Italian summer and won a Lambda Literary Award; Luca Guadagnino filmed it a decade later. Find Me (2019) returns to those characters years on, opening with the boy's father on a train. Enigma Variations follows one man through a lifetime of attachments, and Homo Irrealis (2021) gathers essays on the tense he keeps writing in, the might-have-been.