André Aciman life and biography

André Aciman is a writer, currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York teaching the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. His memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), won a Whiting Writers' Award. He previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton University. In 2009 Aciman was Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Aciman was born in Egypt in a French-speaking home where family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His family were Jews of Turkish and Italian origin who settled in Alexandria, Egypt in 1905. Aciman moved with his family to Italy at the age of fifteen and then to New York at nineteen.

Aciman's 1995 memoir, Out of Egypt, was reviewed widely. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described the volume as a "remarkable memoir...that leaves the reader with a mesmerizing portrait of a now vanished world." She compared his work with that of Lawrence Durrell and also wrote: "There are some wonderfully vivid scenes here, as strange and marvelous as something in Garcia Marquez, as comical and surprising as something in Chekhov."

Writings:

Out of Egypt (memoir) (1995)
False papers: essays on exile and memory (2000)
The Proust Project (2004)
Call Me by Your Name (novel) (2007)
Eight White Nights (novel) (2010)

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