Aris Fioretos

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. Aside from his own literary career, he is also Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University and a member of both the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung and the Akademie der Künste.

Biography Aris Fioretos was born in Gothenburg. His Greek father was a professor of medicine, his Austrian mother ran a gallery. At home, German and Swedish were spoken. He grew up in Lund. He studied with Jacques Derrida in Paris, later at Stockholm and Yale Universities. In 1991, Fioretos earned his PhD in Comparative Literature with The Critical Moment, a deconstructivist analysis of works by Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, and Paul Celan. He has held academic appointments at the Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, Free University, and Humboldt University, the latter two both in Berlin. Since 2010, he is a professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Fioretos is married to art gallerist Marina Schiptjenko, and lives and works in Stockholm, Berlin and Greece.

Work In 1991, Fioretos published his first book, a collection of prose poetry entitled Delandets bok (The Book of Imparting). Since then he has published several works of fiction, including Vanitasrutinerna (The Vanity Routines) (1998), Stockholm Noir (2000), Sanningen om Sascha Knisch (The Truth about Sascha Knisch) (2002), and Den sista greken (The Last Greek) (2009). The latter novel was shortlisted for Sweden's most prestigious literary award, the August Prize, as was his 2015 novel Mary. In the winter of 2009 Den sista greken was awarded the Gleerups Literary Prize, in the spring of 2010 the Novel Prize of Sveriges Radio – an honor also bestowed upon Mary in 2016. Between 2003 and 2007, Fioretos was Cultural Counsellor at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin. Fioretos's contribution to Sweden's most popular radio show, Sommar ("Summer"), a series of self-portraits by Swedes famous and unknown, was aired on 16 July 2010.

An extensive treatment of his literary work until 2012 is made in a conversation, in Swedish, with literary critic Mikael van Reis. Comments on more recent works may be found in a long conversation with German literary critic Cornelia Jentzsch, entitled Den tredje handen (The Third Hand) and included in the box Grå kvartett (Gray Quartet), published in 2024. The same year, he held the prestigious Frankfurt poetics lectures as the first guest not primarily writing in German. The lectures appeared as Solar plexus in 2025. In the same year, the first international conference devoted to his works was held at the University of Zürich. The lectures have been in edited by Irina Hron and Klaus Müller-Wille in the multi-author volume Aris Fioretos. Lektüren aus dem Verstehenslaboratorium, published by edition text + kritik in 2026.

Fioretos has received numerous grants and awards both in Sweden and abroad, including from The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Swedish Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, the DAAD Künstlerprogramm Berlin, the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund, the American Academy in Berlin, and All Souls College, Oxford. Fioretos is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt, where, in 2011, he was elected vice president. Since 2022, he is also a member of Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Fioretos has translated books by Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Walter Serner, among others, into Swedish. He writes regularly for Sweden's largest daily, Dagens Nyheter. His fiction has been translated into several languages – including English, French, German, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian, Romanian, and Serbian. The English edition of The Truth about Sascha Knisch was translated by Fioretos himself.