Exploring the nuances of memory, intimacy, and longing in contemporary fiction and life writing, the literary work of André Aciman has made a lasting impact on modern romantic and queer literature. He gained widespread acclaim for his 2007 coming-of-age novel Call Me by Your Name, which explores an intense summer romance on the Italian Riviera and was later adapted into an Oscar-winning film as well as Call Me by Your Name: The Graphic Novel.
Career & Background
Born on January 2, 1951, in Alexandria, Egypt, André Aciman grew up in a multilingual Jewish household where French, Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic were spoken. At age 14, his family left Egypt for Italy before moving to the United States three years later. He earned his bachelor's degree in English and comparative literature from Lehman College, followed by a master's degree and doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University. Aciman went on to teach French literature and creative writing at Princeton University, Bard College, and New York University. He became a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has taught the works of Marcel Proust and the history of literary theory, while also directing the Writers' Institute.
Aciman launched his publishing career with his 1995 memoir Out of Egypt, which chronicled his family's eccentric aristocratic life and subsequent exile from Alexandria, earning him a Whiting Award. He expanded his bibliography with essay collections such as False Papers and Alibis, while editing The Proust Project. His debut novel Call Me by Your Name won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in 2008. Over his career, he has published subsequent novels including Eight White Nights, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, and Find Me, alongside receiving prestigious honors such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Cullman Center Fellowship from The New York Public Library.
Writing Style & Themes
Aciman's writing focuses on psychological introspection, sensual atmosphere, nostalgia, and the complexities of human affection. Influenced heavily by Marcel Proust and the tradition of the psychological novel, his works frequently investigate how memory shapes identity and how past desires echo through an individual's present. His narratives often center on displaced intellectuals, cosmopolitan settings, and intense emotional bonds that defy straightforward resolution, rendered through elegant, layered prose.
Major Works
- Call Me by Your Name — Published in 2007, this celebrated novel depicts the passionate summer romance between seventeen-year-old Elio and twenty-four-year-old scholar Oliver in 1980s Italy. The book won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and inspired a critically acclaimed 2017 film adaptation.
- Call Me by Your Name: The Graphic Novel — An illustrated adaptation that reimagines Aciman's famous story of first love, sensory discovery, and emotional awakening in a visual format.
- Out of Egypt — Aciman's 1995 memoir detailing his childhood in Alexandria and his Sephardic Jewish family's eventual expulsion from Egypt, which received a Whiting Award.
- Find Me — The 2019 follow-up novel to Call Me by Your Name, expanding on the lives and relationships of Elio, Oliver, and Elio's father Samuel across different stages of life in Rome, Paris, and New York.
