American · b. 1951
André Aciman is a writer and academic born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1951. His Jewish family left Egypt in the 1960s, and he grew up in Italy and then in the United States. He studied at Lafayette College and Harvard, and he teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has also directed the Writers' Institute. He is a scholar of Marcel Proust. His memoir Out of Egypt (1995) describes his family's life in Alexandria and their exile. His first novel, Call Me By Your Name (2007), tells of a summer romance between a teenage boy and a graduate student on the Italian Riviera, and it won a Lambda Literary Award. Its 2017 film adaptation brought it a wide new audience. He later wrote Eight White Nights, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations and Find Me, the sequel to Call Me By Your Name. His books deal with desire, memory, exile and the pull of the past.