STOCKHOLM, March 5 — The Swedish Academy will be allowed to give the 2018 and 2019 Nobel literature prizes together after a scandal prevented last year’s award, the head of the troubled literary body told a newspaper today.
The Nobel Foundation last year stopped the academy from awarding the prize after a string of sexual misconduct allegations against the husband of one of its board members effectively paralysed the institution.
“There will be two Nobel prizes, as we had hoped,” academy head Anders Olsson told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyhetertold after attending a meeting with the foundation.
“The meeting has been good.”
Jean-Claude Arnault, the photographer husband of poet and academy member Katarina Frostenson, was jailed last year after a rape conviction. Frostenson left the body in January after an inquiry found she leaked the names of prize winners.
The scandal, which first emerged in late 2017, and ensuing rift was the biggest crisis to hit the academy in its more than 200-year history with a string of members resigning in protest.
Since then, it has appointed several new members and set up a new prize committee, aiming to restore public confidence and retain the right to pick the winners of the world’s most prestigious literary award.
Lars Heikensten, head of the Nobel Foundation that acts as the custodians of the prizes created in the will of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, had warned last year it might strip the academy of its role in awarding the prestigious literary award. — Reuters
