Vasilis Papageorgiou
Vasilis Papageorgiou, born in 1955 in Thessaloniki, Greece, is a Greek-Swedish writer and translator. He lived in Sweden from 1975 to 2023. He has published many literary works in Greece and Sweden and has translated numerous authors into Greek, including W. G. Sebald, Willy Kyrklund, Eva Runefelt, Magnus William-Olsson, Tomas Tranströmer (Collected poems, shortlisted for the Greek National translation prize 2005) and John Ashbery. He has also translated into Swedish (with colleagues) works by Odysseas Elytis, Thanasis Valtinos, Kenneth Koch, W. G. Sebald, and John Ashbery, as well as all the poems and fragments of Sappho (annotated edition) and an annotated collection of the posthumous poems and prose of Konstantinos Kavafis. Papageorgiou has published essays, book reviews, and literary texts in Greek, Swedish, and British journals.
He is a docent of comparative literature and professor emeritus of creative writing at Linnaeus University in Sweden. In 2015 he received the "Swedish-Greek of the Year" award from the Board for Cultural Exchange between Sweden and Greece. His thesis Euripides’ Medea and Cosmetics is a post-structuralist analysis in which Euripides, aided by Medea’s otherness, critiques the Greek logos. His monograph on Eva Runefelt’s poetry collection Mjuka mörkret (Soft Darkness), and his essay collection Here, and Here: Essays on Affirmation and Tragic Awareness, are critical works that explore how logos can exceed its own arbitrariness within an affirmative and tragically aware openness. His more recent publications study how melancholia caused by the paralysis of logos can turn into euphoria when a freer logos operates, and vice versa.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:02 (CET).