Guest of the ilb 2003
Aris Fioretos was born in 1960 in Göteborg, Sweden, to Greek and Austrian parents. He studied Comparative Literature at the University of Stockholm, the École des Hautes Études in Paris and Yale University. He has published essays and scholarly works on Hölderlin, Benjamin, and Celan, and also translated a number of writers, including Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin and Vladimir Nabokov, into Swedish. In 1997, he was a writer-in-residence at the DAAD Künstlerprogramm in Berlin and in 2001, a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has received numerous prizes, including the Swedish Academy’s Karl Ragnar Gierow-Prize (1994).
Fioretos has published fiction since 1991. His debut novel 'Stockholm Noir' was published in 2000 and received several prizes. The German translation, which was published in the same year under the title 'Die Seelensucherin', was enthusiastically received by the critics. Fioretos not only brilliantly links various narrative levels, but also connects fictive destinies with the real history of science. On winding routes, the reader accompanies a young Berliner on a three-day search for her father to Stockholm in the winter of 1925, gradually learning how her destiny is entwined with that of a self-styled Swedish 'soul biologist', who is convinced that he can locate the exact position of the soul in the human brain. Fioretos captures the 1920s atmosphere in an evocative way. At the end, every detail, with its elaborate evidentiality proves itself indispensable for the novel as a whole. His second novel, entitled 'Sanningen om Sasha Knisch' (Engl: The Truth about Sasha Knisch), also takes Berlin of the 1920s as its point of departure, using historical facts to intertwine various types of narrative. What starts out as a love story about two people, turns, with the death of one of them, into a thriller in which the saving truth is hidden in that which did not happen. Against the backdrop of a scientific conspiracy, Fioretos describes the both illicit and seductive nature of sexuality, offering a declaration of love to the powers of imagination that is as astute as it is comical. Reviewing 'Die Seelensucherin', German critic Hubert Winkels found that Fioretos achieved the highest task of literature, namely 'to generate insight by using the means of poetry'. The author has been cultural attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin since 2003.
© international literature festival berlin
Aris Fioretos online: www.arisfioretos.com | 
