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André Aciman (born in Alexandria, Egypt) is an American novelist, essayist, memoirist, and leading scholar of the works of Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in several volumes of The Best American Essays.

Biography

Born into a stateless family Aciman grew up in the cosmopolitan milieu of Alexandria. The language spoken at home was French, but Italian, Greek, Arabic, and Ladino were also spoken. Aciman always attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy , in Rome. Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he attended Lehman College, graduating in 1973.

Aciman is the author of Out of Egypt, an account of his childhood growing up in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from Harvard University and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Comparative Literature Department and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He previously taught Comparative Literature at Princeton University, Bard College, and creative writing at New York University and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

In addition to his memoir Out of Egypt, Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and most recently a novel entitled Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and which won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004).

References

External links

• Faculty webpage at CUNY
• New faculty announcement with picture at CUNY

• American essayists
• American memoirists
• American literary critics
• Bard College faculty
• Harvard University alumni
• New York University faculty
• Egyptian Jews
• People from Alexandria
• 1951 births
• Living people
• The New Yorker people
• Turkish Jews
• Yeshiva University faculty
• Wesleyan University faculty