Vasilis Papageorgiou
Vasilis Papageorgiou 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 and John Ashbery. He has translated into Swedish books of Odysseas Elytis,, Kenneth Koch, W. G. Sebald, John Ashbery, all the poems and fragments of Sappho 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 into euphoria, and vice versa.
Publications
In Greece
Κρυπταισθησίες, 1979Σύγχρονοι Σουηδοί Ποιητές, 1988Παίξ’ το πάλι Χαμ, 1997Νυμφαίος θάνατος, 1998- Tomas Tranströmer, Τα ποιήματα, 2004Ιππόλυτος Καλυπτόμενος, 2005Ευφορία, 2014Στιγμές θέρους, 2016Αϋπνία, 2017Κλαίρη Μιτσοτάκη: Μας παίρνει ο αέρας, 2017Θανάσης Βαλτινός: Ήλοι, ελιές, λέξεις, ήλιος, 2017Ωραίες 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, 1993Boken om Malmö, 1994 Skeptikerns dilemma: Texter om Willy Kyrklunds författarskap, 1997 Handens blick, 1998
- Sapfo, Dikter och fragment, 1999 Malmö City International, 2000En hand klär sakta, 2002Panta rei i Mjuka mörkret, 2003Hippolytos Beslöjad, 2006Ingen hand orörd, 2007