Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Jonas Hassen Khemiri (born 27 December 1978) is a Swedish writer. He is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of essays, short stories and plays. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages. He has received the August Prize for fiction and a Village Voice Obie Award for best script. In 2017 he became the first Swedish writer to have a short story published in The New Yorker. Khemiri's novel The Family Clause (FSG) was awarded the French Prix Médicis and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Khemiri moved to New York in 2021 for a Cullman Fellowship at The New York Public Library and currently teaches in the Creative Writing program at NYU. In 2023 he was a Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bennington College.

Education

Khemiri studied literature at Stockholm University and international economics at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Career

Novels

Khemiri's debut novel, Ett öga rött (One eye red), was published in 2003. It sold over 200,000 copies in Sweden, was adapted into a movie and became the best-selling novel of any category in 2004.

Khemiri's second novel, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger (Montecore: en unik tiger), received the Sveriges Radio Award for Best Swedish Novel of 2007. It was a finalist for the August Prize and translated into more than 20 languages. In the US, Montecore was translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles and published by Knopf and the New York Times described the novel as "funny, ambitious and inventive. Also black: rage and tragedy pulse beneath the fireworks." In 2011, the novel was chosen by the critics at Dagens Nyheter as one of the top 10 works of fiction, published in Sweden in 2000–2010.