André Aciman

André Aciman (born January 2 1951 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", as well as in several volumes of "The Best American Essays". Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award winning memoir "Out of Egypt", an account of his childhood as a secular Jew growing up in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University and currently teaches at the Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York. He previously taught comparative literature at Princeton University, Bard College, and creative writing at New York University and Yeshiva University. Among his graduate students at NYU were future authors Nell Freudenberger, Hwee Hwee Tan, Jacob M. Appel and Alison Lynn. ["Village Voice", October 2, 2002.]

Born André Albert Aciman into a Sephardic Jewish family holding Turkish nationality (his father was originally from Istanbul), Aciman grew up in the cosmopolitan milieu of multilingual Alexandria. The language spoken at home was French, but Italian, Greek, Arabic, and Ladino were also heard and occasionally spoken. Aciman always attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1969, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he attended Lehman College, graduating in 1973. In addition to his 1996 memoir "Out of Egypt", Aciman has published two other books: "False Papers" (2001), a collection of fourteen essays, 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".

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