Aris Fioretos from Sweden was a literary scholar in his first career, having studied in Stockholm and Yale. From 1989 to 1990, he was at the FU Berlin to pursue research for his doctorate on Hölderlin, Benjamin and Celan. After completing his doctorate in 1991, he taught comparative literary studies at various universities around the world. However, by the time he had completed his postdoctoral Habilitation (venia legendi) in 2001, he had already inwardly turned his back on academic life. Fioretos, who has translated authors like Friedrich Hölderlin and Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish, had himself already been writing prose since 1991. His first novel (Stockholm noir, or in German Die Seelensucherin, 2000) was a great success. Today, he is a highly respected author who has won numerous awards in his native country and whose books have also made the best-seller lists in Germany. Aris Fioretos is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature.

He has come back to Berlin time and time again, including a period from 1997 to 1998 as a guest of the DAAD’s Artists-in-Berlin programme, when he did research for his novel The Truth about Sascha Knisch (2006), which is set in the German capital. However, the novel was actually written in London. He had a cosmopolitan nature given to him right from the very first day: Fioretos was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1960,  the son of a migrant family. His father had left his Greek homeland in the early 1950s, had married an Austrian while in exile in Vienna and had then gone to Sweden with her. The main character in Fioretos’s novel The Last Greek is also a Greek emigré in Sweden. The book was published in Sweden in 2009 and came out in Germany in 2011 under the title Der letzte Grieche. His novel Half the Sun, which was published in 2012, has also appeared in German under the title Die halbe Sonne. For Aris Fioretos, literature is “archaeology of the soul”. What writing means to him can be read in his collection of essays called My Black Skull (in German Mein schwarzer Schädel), published in 2003 in the Artists-in-Berlin programme’s Spurensuche series.

Even while Fioretos was working as a Cultural Attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin from 2003 to 2007, he at no time sacrificed his writing for his diplomatic career. However, an idea was already developing, namely a project to make the writer Nelly Sachs better known in Germany. The first German-language Nobel Laureate in Literature, who fled from the Nazis in 1940 to seek refuge in Stockholm and wrote a large body of poetical works there up to her death in 1970, had always fascinated him as a student. In 2010, Fioretos organised the travelling exhibition Flight and Metamorphosis at the Jewish Museum Berlin in memory of the poet, and not only published a major pictorial biography but also a four-volume annotated edition of Nelly Sachs’s works. The exhibition was a great success with the public in Berlin and Stockholm and then moved to other venues. A year later, Fieretos returned to Berlin – as Dag Hammarskjöld Guest Professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Department of Northern European Studies, where he taught until 2014.