Aris Fioretos

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Aris Fioretos (born 6 February 1960) is a Swedish writer, translator and scholar of Greek and Austrian extraction who writes in Swedish, German and English. He is a Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University and a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung and the Akademie der Künste.

Fioretos was born in Gothenburg and grew up in Lund. His Greek father was a professor of medicine and his Austrian mother ran a gallery. At home, German and Swedish were spoken. He studied in Paris with Jacques Derrida, then at Stockholm University and Yale University, where he earned a PhD in Comparative Literature in 1991 with The Critical Moment, a deconstructive analysis of Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan.

He has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, Free University Berlin and Humboldt University, and since 2010 he has been a professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Fioretos is married to art gallerist Marina Schiptjenko.

In 1991 he published his first book, Delandets bok (The Book of Imparting). His novels include Vanitasrutinerna (1998), Stockholm Noir (2000), Sanningen om Sascha Knisch (2002) and Den sista greken (The Last Greek) (2009), the latter shortlisted for Sweden’s August Prize. His 2015 novel Mary was also shortlisted. He won the Gleerups Literary Prize in 2009 and the Novel Prize of Sveriges Radio in 2010 (Mary received the prize in 2016 as well).

Between 2003 and 2007 Fioretos served as Cultural Counsellor at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin. He has contributed to Sweden’s radio show Sommar and has given extensive interviews about his work. The Frankfurt poetics lectures he delivered in 2011 were published as Solar plexus in 2025, and a 2024 international conference devoted to his work was held at the University of Zürich.

Fioretos has received numerous grants and awards from organizations including The Getty Center, the Swedish Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD Berlin, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund, the American Academy in Berlin and All Souls College, Oxford. He is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (elected vice president in 2011) and, since 2022, a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Fioretos has translated works by Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, Vladimir Nabokov and Walter Serner into Swedish and writes regularly for Dagens Nyheter. His fiction has been translated into many languages, and he translated the English edition of The Truth about Sascha Knisch himself.