Vasilis Papageorgiou

Vasilis Papageorgiou (Greek: Βασίλης Παπαγεωργίου, Thessaloniki, 1955) is a Greek-Swedish writer and translator. From 1975 to 2023 he lived in Sweden. He has published many literary works in different genres in Greece and Sweden. He has translated books of numerous writers into Greek, such as W. G. Sebald, Willy Kyrklund, Eva Runefelt, , Tomas Tranströmer (Collected poems, shortlisted for the Greek National translation prize 2005 ) and John Ashbery. He has translated into Swedish (with different colleagues) books of Odysseas Elytis, , Kenneth Koch, W. G. Sebald, John Ashbery, all the poems and fragments of Sappho (annotated edition) and an annotated collection with posthumous poems and prose of Konstantinos Kavafis. He 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 award "Swedish-Greek of the Year" by the Board for Cultural Exchange between Sweden and Greece.

His thesis Euripides’ Medea and Cosmetics is a post-structuralist analysis of the tragedy, in which Euripides, with the help of the radical otherness of Medea, criticises the Greek logos. His monograph on the poetry collection Mjuka mörkret by Eva Runefelt, Panta rei i Mjuka mörkret, and his essay collection Here, and Here: Essays on Affirmation and Tragic Awareness, are a series of critical analyses, which try to follow the use of logos as it exceeds the arbitrariness of logos within an affirmative and tragically aware openness. In his most recent theoretical and literary publications Papageorgiou studies how certain texts turn melancholia (which is generated by the paralysis of logos) into euphoria (which is created by a logos free from the arbitrariness of logos), and vice versa.

Publications

In Greece

Κρυπταισθησίες, 1979 Σύγχρονοι Σουηδοί Ποιητές, 1988 Παίξ’ το πάλι Χαμ, 1997 Νυμφαίος θάνατος, 1998 Tomas Tranströmer, Τα ποιήματα, 2004 Ιππόλυτος Καλυπτόμενος, 2005 Ευφορία, 2014 Στιγμές θέρους, 2016 Αϋπνία (Aypnia), 2017 Κλαίρη Μιτσοτάκη: Μας παίρνει ο αέρας, 2017 Θανάσης Βαλτινός: Ήλοι, ελιές, λέξεις, ήλιος, 2017 Ωραίες ψυχές, 2019 Μοναχική ανθοφορία: Μέρες χωρίς κορώνες, 2020 Δημήτρης Δημητριάδης: Χώρα, σώματα, λέξεις, 2020 Στιγμώνες, Προαισθήματα και αισθήματα κοσμογονίας, 2023 Φόνοι στη Θεσσαλονίκη, 2025

In Sweden

Euripides’ Medea and Cosmetics, 1986 Konstantinos Kavafis, Den osannolika gryningen (with Lo Snöfall), 1993 Boken om Malmö, 1994 (curator) Skeptikerns dilemma: Texter om Willy Kyrklunds författarskap, 1997 (editor) Handens blick (with Lo Snöfall), 1998 Sapfo, Dikter och fragment (with Magnus William-Olsson), 1999 (enlarged pocket version 2006) Malmö City International, 2000 En hand klär sakta (with Lo Snöfall), 2002 Panta rei i Mjuka mörkret, 2003 Hippolytos Beslöjad, 2006 Ingen hand orörd (with Lo Snöfall), 2007

In the United Kingdom

Here, and Here: Essays on Affirmation and Tragic Awareness, 2010