He is the author of several novels, including Call Me by Your Name (winner of the 2007 Lambda Literary Award[10] in the Gay Fiction category and made into a film) and a 1995 memoir, Out of Egypt, which won a Whiting Award.[11] Although best known for Call Me by Your Name,[12] Aciman stated in an interview in 2019 that his best book is the novel Eight White Nights.[13]
Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of Regine and Henri N. Aciman, who owned a knitting factory.[14][15][16][17] His mother was deaf.[18] Aciman was raised in a French-speaking home where family members spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic.[5]
His parents were Sephardic Jews, of Turkish and Italian origin, from families that had settled in Alexandria in 1905 (Turkish surname: Acıman).[6] As members of one of the Mutamassirun ("foreign") communities, his family members were unable to become Egyptian citizens. As a child, Aciman mistakenly believed that he was a French citizen.[19] He attended British schools in Egypt.[13] His family was spared from the 1956–57 exodus and expulsions from Egypt. However, increased tensions with Israel under President Gamal Abdel Nasser put Jews in a precarious position and his family left Egypt nine years later in 1965.[20]
After his father purchased Italian citizenship for the family, Aciman moved with his mother and brother as refugees to Rome while his father moved to Paris. They moved to New York City in 1968.[5] He earned a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Lehman College in 1973, and an M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 1988.[21]
Aciman's 1996 memoir Out of Egypt, about Alexandria before the 1956 expulsions from Egypt, was reviewed widely.[22][23][24]InThe New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described the book 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 noted, "There are some wonderfully vivid scenes here, as strange and marvelous as something in García Márquez.
^ abcd"André Aciman". City University of New York. Archived from the original on 28 August 2008. Retrieved 18 August 2009.
^ abc"André Aciman profile". City University of New York. Archived from the original on 14 June 2011. Retrieved 18 August 2009. In addition to teaching the history of literary theory, he teaches the work of Marcel Proust and the literature of memory and exile.
^"Winners of Whiting Awards". The New York Times. 30 October 1995. p. C15. Retrieved 21 September 2009. Andre Aciman, whose first book, Out of Egypt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), chronicles his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt.
^"Deaths: ACIMAN, HENRI N". The New York Times. 15 May 2008. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on 3 August 2017. Retrieved 5 September 2017.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^Meaney, Thomas (February–March 2007). "Naming Youths". Bookforum. Retrieved 21 September 2009. How strange that Aciman's first novel should run against the Proustian grain.
^Ormsby, Eric (24 January 2007). "Nature Loves to Hide". The New York Sun. p. 13. pays its respects to Proust but is brilliantly original....This is a novel of seduction in which the final prize is to win back something small but precious from the coquettishness of memory.
^D'Erasmo, Stacey (25 January 2007). "Suddenly One Summer". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 September 2009. This novel is hot. A coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation and something of an epitaph, Call Me by Your Name is also an open question. It is an exceptionally beautiful book.
^Aciman, Andre (16 June 2004). "Sailing to Byzantium by Way of Ithaca". The New York Sun. p. 1. Proust fans filled the Celeste Bartos Forum at the New York Public Library on Wednesday for an evening titled 'The Proust Project: A Discussion With Latter-Day Disciples, Admirers, and Shameless Imitators.' The event celebrated the publication of a book called The Proust Project in which Andre Aciman, a professor at CUNY Graduate Center, asked a group of writers to reflect on In Search of Lost Time.
