André Aciman

André Aciman is an Egyptian-born American writer and scholar whose novels, memoirs, and essays recurrently probe the intricacies of desire, memory, exile, and cultural estrangement, often informed by his Sephardic Jewish heritage and peripatetic early life across Alexandria, Rome, and Paris before settling in New York. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, to parents of Italian Jewish descent, Aciman experienced the upheavals of mid-20th-century Jewish expulsion from Arab countries, which profoundly shaped his literary preoccupation with loss and transience. Aciman earned a B.A. in English and comparative literature from Lehman College, followed by an A.M. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University, and currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, French, and Biography and Memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he also directs the Writers' Institute and Center for the Humanities. His debut memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), evocatively recounts his family's expulsion and dissolution in Nasser's Egypt, earning acclaim for its elegiac prose on cosmopolitan dissolution. Aciman's breakthrough novel, Call Me by Your Name (2007), a sensual depiction of an adolescent's infatuation with an older houseguest in 1980s Italy, achieved New York Times bestseller status and inspired Luca Guadagnino's 2017 film adaptation, which garnered an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; subsequent works like Enigma Variations (2017) and the sequel Find Me (2019) extend these explorations of erotic longing and temporal fluidity, while essay collections such as False Papers (2000) and Alibis (2011) dissect the phenomenology of place and self-deception. Though some critics have faulted his portrayals of age-disparate attractions and same-sex desire—written from a heterosexual perspective—as insufficiently attuned to contemporary identity orthodoxies, Aciman's oeuvre prioritizes psychological veracity over ideological conformity, yielding a corpus distinguished by stylistic elegance and unflinching introspection.

André Aciman was born on 2 January 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Sephardic Jewish parents Henri and Regine Aciman, whose ancestry traced to Italian and Turkish roots. His father's ownership of a knitting factory afforded the family a measure of affluence within the city's prosperous Jewish merchant class. The household reflected Alexandria's polyglot character, with French serving as the dominant language, alongside Italian used by family members, Ladino spoken daily by his grandmother and her siblings, and exposure to Greek and Arabic in daily interactions.

Aciman attended English-language schools in Alexandria, initially a British institution that later shifted toward Arabic-influenced curricula amid post-colonial changes, where he was often the sole Jewish student among affluent Arab and Egyptian peers. This environment immersed him in classical literature and diverse cultural influences, emblematic of the city's Mediterranean cosmopolitanism, which blended Levantine, European, and North African elements in a once-thriving Jewish community.

André Aciman's family traces its Sephardic Jewish roots to Spain, where ancestors resided for centuries before the expulsion of Jews in the late 15th century, leading to migrations across the Mediterranean to regions including the Dalmatian Coast, Turkey, Syria, and eventually Egypt. His grandparents spoke Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of Sephardic communities, reflecting this diasporic heritage marked by repeated displacements.