André Aciman

André Aciman is primarily an essayist and short-story writer: the author of several novels and essays on the work of Marcel Proust.

He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1951, into a Jewish family with Turkish roots on one side and Italian roots on the other. His parents owned a knitwear factory, and his mother was deaf-mute. The Aciman household mainly spoke French, but André, thanks to frequent guests in the home, also spoke a little Greek and Arabic, and knew Sephardic, one of the Jewish languages. Later the family moved for a short time to France, then to Italy, until, when André was a teenager, they settled permanently in America, in New York. There André graduated from Lehman College with a degree in English and comparative literature, later continued his studies at Harvard University, and there received his doctorate.

In one interview he said that he began writing in sixth grade, and it seemed terribly wrong to him. He preferred poetry, rejected prose, but loved the classics and only them (he did not like modernism).

At present André is a professor, teaching English and literary theory at the City University of New York. He is well known in academic circles and heads one of the education centers. He is also a visiting lecturer at Princeton University.

When asked how he learned to write, André replied: "I learned not how to write, but how not to write."

"Born in Egypt into an interethnic family where it was customary to speak several languages. He was educated in an English school: first in Alexandria, and then in Rome, where Aciman moved with his whole family in 1965, when anti-Jewish attacks in Egypt intensified. Aciman described the Egyptian period of his life in the memoir Out of Egypt (1995). In the interval between Alexandria and Rome, the Acimans lived for some time in France, and in 1968 the family moved to the United States. In addition to English, the writer, who from a young age interacted with different cultural and linguistic environments, speaks French fluently and knows Turkish and Greek."

In the United States, André Aciman received a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and then defended his doctoral dissertation at Harvard. In 2007