Sex scandal's latest casualty: The 2018 Nobel Prize in literature
BC NOBEL LITERATURE MISCONDUCT 1STLD WRITETHRU (TRIMS) NYT
Christina Anderson, Richard Perez-Pena, The New York Times
The Swedish Academy has been consumed by charges that a man close to it sexually assaulted women, and that the academy mishandled the allegations.
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Anchorage Daily News
STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in Literature, the world's most prestigious accolade for writing, will not be awarded this year, for the first time since 1949, as the fallout from a sexual abuse scandal that has battered the reputations of cultural gatekeepers continues to reverberate in literary and publishing circles around the globe.

The Swedish Academy, the 232-year-old panel of writers and scholars that confers the prize, announced on Friday that it would take the extraordinary step of postponing the 2018 award until next year, when it will name two winners — something it has not done since delaying the 1949 prize, bestowed on William Faulkner in 1950. The academy is involved only in the literature award, so other Nobel Prizes are not affected.

The academy said it would focus on restoring a reputation tarnished by a wide-ranging scandal that has bitterly divided Sweden's normally consensual society and even drawn in the royal family as unwitting players. The scandal has the same essential elements of others that have erupted around the world in the #MeToo era: An influential man accused of using his power to coerce women into sex; associates accused of covering for him or minimizing his conduct; and victims newly emboldened to go public with their allegations.

In November, a Swedish newspaper reported that 18 women said they had been sexually assaulted or harassed by Jean-Claude Arnault, a photographer and cultural impresario who is closely tied to the academy.

Arnault is married to a member of the academy, the poet Katarina Frostenson, and is a close friend to other members. The couple owns Forum, a well-known cultural center in Stockholm that received funding from the academy.

Accusers say that Arnault used his sway in the arts world, including his connections to the academy, to pressure young women into sex, and that some of his offenses took place at academy-owned properties in Stockholm and Paris. At least one woman's complaints to the academy about Arnault more than 20 years ago were rebuffed.

Accusations continue to emerge. Just this week, it was reported that Arnault had groped Crown Princess Victoria, the heir to Sweden's throne. Arnault has also been accused of leaking information about the academy's deliberations and selections in past years.

Through his lawyer, Arnault has denied any wrongdoing.

Sara Danius, the first woman to be chosen as the academy's permanent secretary (essentially, its chief official), severed the group's ties with Arnault and Forum, and commissioned an investigation by a law firm.

Even so, several members resigned in disgust, and last month, Danius was herself forced out from the top post, although she remains a member of the academy. Shortly after, Frostenson also stepped down.

Her demotion prompted mass protests by critics who said that a woman had been scapegoated for the sexual misconduct of a man, and that Danius had been punished for trying to introduce openness and accountability to a group that preferred to close ranks.

The academy was founded in 1786 as the arbiter of Swedish language and letters, and it was designated by the industrialist Alfred Nobel, in his will, to award the literature prize in his name. It began choosing winners in 1901, and for almost as long, some of its choices have been assailed as politicized, parochial or just misguided.

The list of prize winners has been heavy on authors, many of them Scandinavian, who are not well-remembered generations later, while the academy has passed over writers like Twain, Tolstoy, Proust and Joyce. In one notorious selection, it bestowed the 1974 prize on two of the academy's own members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, snubbing candidates like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene, none of whom ever got the nod.

The decision to award the Nobel to Bob Dylan in 2016 — the first American to be so recognized since novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993 — was one of the most-debated arts awards in recent memory.

The prize has introduced vast new audiences to authors who are not well known, particularly in less populous and less prosperous nations. It leads to a huge increase in book sales, prompting publishers to reissue old volumes and publish new translations of a winner's work.

The current crisis could undermine the authority of the academy and the credibility of the prize like nothing before it.

The academy has been depleted by resignations, its secretive workings exposed to unflattering scrutiny, and the Nobel Foundation, which manages Nobel's legacy and oversees all of the awards, expressed concern about the damage to the prizes as a whole.

"The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize," Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement early Friday. He said that while the award was intended to be awarded yearly, it should be postponed when the group choosing winners had a problem "so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible."

Until Friday, the academy had insisted that it was sticking to its usual schedule, winnowing potential laureates to a shortlist by summer and anointing a prize winner in October. "But confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past half year," the acting permanent secretary, literary scholar Anders Olsson, told Swedish Radio on Friday, "and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize."

Another member, the historian Peter Englund, wrote in an email: "I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the Academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?"

Mats Svegfors, a well-known journalist and politician, said the affair threatened to damage Sweden as a whole.

"When institutions fail that means that gradually we will lose trust, and that means that we lose confidence in our society," he said. "When we realized that the Swedish Academy, that the institution doesn't work, it hurts our self-perception."

Some of the academy's 18 members resigned over Frostenson's continued membership, and several more quit over the treatment of Danius. That left the group with 10 active members — too few, under its rules, to elect new members.

Academy appointments are for life, and until this week, the organization's rules did not provide for resignations; members who quit were treated as merely inactive, but could not be replaced.

On Wednesday, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the academy's patron, who said he had followed the matter "with great concern," announced that he had changed the rules to allow resignations, and to allow the panel to replace any member who had been inactive for two years. It was a rare intervention by the monarch, whose role is mostly ceremonial.

Olsson said: "We are bringing in legal expertise and we are going to get better at what we do. We must vote in new members, and fast." He promised increased transparency, and "more and better dialogue" with both the monarchy and the Nobel Foundation.

The academy also promised that "routines will be tightened regarding conflict-of-interest issues and the management of information classified as secret," and that "internal work arrangements and external communication will be refreshed."

Kjell Espmark, a historian and one of the academy members who resigned, said he would not return because a more complete purge was needed.

Events have exposed "the rot that has taken hold within the academy," he said. "Its high-minded goals have given way to nepotism, attempts to whitewash serious infractions, broken conflict of interest rules, musty macho values and arrogant bullying."

After meeting on Thursday, members of the academy had voiced optimism that the prize could be awarded in October, as usual. The news that the prize would, instead, be postponed prompted speculation that the academy had bowed to pressure from the Nobel Foundation.

"The Nobel Foundation presumes that the Swedish Academy will now put all its efforts into the task of restoring its credibility as a prize-awarding institution," Heldin, the foundation's chairman said, "and that the academy will report the concrete actions that are undertaken."