André Aciman

André Aciman was born in Alexandria in 1951 into a Sephardi Jewish family of Turkish and Italian origin that had settled in Egypt in 1905. Growing hostility towards Jews under Nasser drove the family out in 1965, and he told that story in Out of Egypt (1995), the memoir that won him a Whiting Award and that remains one of the essential accounts of the disappearance of Egypt's Jewish community. He is a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and a scholar of Proust, and the author of Call Me by Your Name (2007), which won the Lambda Literary Award and became the 2017 film.