The Swedish Academy (Swedish: Svenska Akademien), founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Its 18 members, who are elected for life, comprise the highest Swedish language authority. Outside Scandinavia, it is best known as the body that chooses the laureates for the annual Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in memory of the donor Alfred Nobel.
The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. Modelled after the Académie française, it has 18 members. It is said that Gustaf III originally intended there to be twenty members, half the number of those in the French Academy, but eventually decided on eighteen because the Swedish expression De Aderton – 'The Eighteen' – had such a fine solemn ring.[1] The academy's motto is "Talent and Taste" ("Snille och Smak" in Swedish). The academy's primary purpose is to further the "purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language" ("Svenska Språkets renhet, styrka och höghet") (Walshe, 1965).
The building now known as the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building was built for the bourgeoisie. The bottom floor was used as a trading exchange (this later became the stock exchange), and the upper floor was used for balls, New Year's Eve parties, etc. When the academy was founded, the ballroom was the biggest room in Stockholm that could be heated and thus used in the winter, so the King asked if he could borrow it.
The academy has had its annual meeting there every year since, attended by members of the Swedish royal family.[2] However, it was not until 1914 that the academy gained permanent use of the upper floor as their own. It is here that the academy meets and, among other business, announces the names of Nobel Prize laureates. This task arguably makes the academy one of the world's most influential literary bodies.
The Swedish King is the only person who, apart from the members, has the right to attend the meetings of the academy. On 3 March 2022 the Swedish King attended a weekly academy meeting, the first time a Swedish king has done so in over 200 years.[3][4]
Members are elected by a secret ballot in the Academy and before the result is made public it must be submitted to the Academy's Patron, the King of Sweden, for his approval. Members of the Academy include writers, linguists, literary scholars, historians and a prominent jurist. Initially writers were in the minority in the Academy, but during the twentieth century the number of writers grew to represent more than half of The Eighteen. The Swedish Academy have a long history of being a heavily male dominated institution, but the Academy has recently moved towards better equality. Since 20 December 2019 one third of the chairs belong to female Academy members.[5]
Prior to 2018 it was not possible for members of the academy to resign; membership was for life, although the academy could decide to exclude members. This happened twice to Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, who was excluded in 1794, re-elected in 1805 and excluded again in 1811. In 1989, members Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten chose to stop participating in the meetings of the academy, over its refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned him to death for The Satanic Verses,[6] shortly after a third member, Werner Aspenström, also stopped participating in the meetings for unspecified reasons. In 2005, Knut Ahnlund made the same decision, as a protest against the choice of Elfriede Jelinek as Nobel laureate for 2004.[7][8][9] On 25 November 2017, Lotta Lotass said in an interview that she had not participated in the meetings of the academy for more than two years and did not consider herself a member any more.[10]
Dag Hammarskjöld's former farm at Backåkra, close to Ystad in southern Sweden, was bought in 1957 as a summer residence by Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of the United Nations (1953–1961). The south wing of the farm is reserved as a summer retreat for the 18 members of the Swedish Academy, of which Hammarskjöld was a member.
On 11 April 2019, the academy published its financial statements for the first time in its history.[11] According to it, the academy owned financial assets worth 1.58billion Swedish kronor at the end of 2018 (equal to $170M, €150M, or £130M).
Controversies
1795 suspension
In the wake of the Academy's founder King Gustav III's death in 1792, the standing of the Swedish Academy deteriorated, and in 1795 the Academy was suspended for two years on political grounds.[12]
1989 Rushdie affair
Following the Academy meeting on 23 February 1989, members Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten resigned from their seats in protest to the Academy's refusal to condemn Iran's death decree against writer Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, which was considered blasphemous by Moslems.[6] "I am so disappointed and sad that the Academy couldn't choose sides for or against Rushdie," Ekman said. "The academy should have supported Rushdie, it is a question of freedom of speech." Gyllensten said: "Death threats and oppression from Iranian fundamentalists are violations of everything the Academy stands for."[6] Shortly after, a third member, Werner Aspenström, also left his seat. Aspenström did not reveal his reasons for resigning but indicated support for a stronger statement by the Academy on the Rushdie case.[13] At the time it was not possible for a member to formally resign and be replaced, as they were elected for life, so the number of Academy members were reduced following the controversy.[6]
The Academy's decision to stay with its traditional policy not to make any political statements in an effort to avoid any accusations of a politicization of the Nobel Prize in Literature was heavily criticized by various commentators in the Swedish press.[6]
In March 2016, the Swedish Academy condemned the death warrant against Salman Rushdie.[14]
2018 controversies
Katarina Frostenson (Seat 18) was accused of leaking classified information from the Nobel Committee's deliberations, and her husband accused of sexual assaults and harrassments.
In April 2018, three Swedish Academy members (Klas Östergren, Kjell Espmark, and Peter Englund) resigned in response to a sexual-misconduct investigation involving author Jean-Claude Arnault, who is married to the member Katarina Frostenson.[15] Arnault was accused of sexual assault and harassment by at least 18 women. He and his wife were also accused of leaking the names of prize recipients on at least seven occasions so friends could profit from online bets.[16][15] He denied all accusations, although he was later convicted of rape and sentenced to two years and six months in prison.[17][18][19]Sara Danius, the permanent secretary, hired a law firm to investigate if Frostenson had violated the Academy's regulations by leaking any confidential information and whether Arnault had any influence on the Academy, but no legal action was taken. The investigation caused a division among the members of the Academy. Following a vote to stop Frostenson's membership, the three members resigned in protest over the decisions made by the Academy.[15][20] Two former permanent secretaries, Sture Allén and Horace Engdahl, called Danius a weak leader.[15]
On 10 April, Danius was requested to resign from her position by the Academy, bringing the number of empty seats to four.[21] Although the Academy voted against removing Katarina Frostenson from the committee,[22] she voluntarily agreed to withdraw from participating in the academy, bringing the total of withdrawals to five. Because two other seats were still vacant from the Rushdie affair, this left only 11 active members. On 4 May 2018, the Swedish Academy announced that the selection would be postponed until 2019, when two laureates would be chosen. It was still technically possible to choose a 2018 laureate, as only eight active members are required to choose a recipient. However, there were concerns that the academy was not in any condition to credibly present the award.[23][24][25][26]
The scandal was widely seen as damaging to the credibility of the prize and its authority.[15] As noted by Andrew Brown in The Guardian in a lengthy deconstruction of the scandal:
"The scandal has elements of a tragedy, in which people who set out to serve literature and culture discovered they were only pandering to writers and the people who hang around with them. The pursuit of excellence in art was entangled with the pursuit of social prestige. The academy behaved as if the meals in its clubhouse were as much an accomplishment as the work that got people elected there."[27]
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden said a reform of the rules may be evaluated, including the introduction of the right to resign in respect of the current lifelong membership of the committee.[28] On 5 March 2019, it was announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature would once again be awarded, and laureates for both 2018 and 2019 would be announced together. The decision came after several changes were made to the structure of the Swedish Academy as well as to the Nobel Committee members selection, to "[restore] trust in the Academy as a prize-awarding institution".[29] On 19 November, the Swedish Academy added five temporary external members to help its five-strong Nobel Committee in their deliberations for the 2019 and 2020 awards: author and literary translator Gun-Britt Sundstrom; publisher Henrik Petersen; and literary critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Rebecka Karde and Kristoffer Leandoer.[30] Just after two weeks, two of the newly added external members, Sundstrom and Leandoer, left the committee, with the latter saying the work to reform the scandal-hit Swedish Academy was taking too long. "I leave my job in the Nobel Committee because I have neither the patience nor the time to wait for the result of the work to change that has been started," Leandoer said.[31]
The Academy's dictionaries
In pursuance of its goals of maintaining and strengthening the Swedish language, the Academy publishes three dictionaries.[32] The first is a one-volume spelling dictionary called Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL), which is in its 14th edition. The second is a multi-volume dictionary (38 volumes so far), edited on principles similar to those of the Oxford English Dictionary, entitled Svenska Akademiens Ordbok (SAOB), the first volume of which was published in 1893 and the last one in 2023.[33] The third is a two-volume dictionary edited at Gothenburg University and titled Svensk ordbok utgiven av Svenska Akademien ('Swedish dictionary published by the Swedish Academy'); it covers modern Swedish and includes pronunciations, etymologies etc, as well as definitions and some examples. In addition to printed publications, all three dictionaries are also available to access free of charge online at svenska.se.
In addition to the dictionaries the Academy has also published a four-volume grammar of the Swedish language (Svenska Akademiens grammatik, SAG) aimed at researchers, linguists and university students among others, as well as a single-volume counterpart for those requiring something less comprehensive (Svenska Akademiens språklära, SAS).
Awards and prizes
Since 1901, the Swedish Academy has annually decided who will be the laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in memory of the donor Alfred Nobel.
The Swedish Academy annually awards nearly 50 different prizes and scholarships, most of them for domestic Swedish authors. Common to all is that they are awarded without competition and without application. The Dobloug Prize, the largest of these at $40,000, is a literature prize awarded for Swedish and Norwegian fiction.[34][35]
The Great Prize
Swedish: Stora Priset, literally the Great Prize, was instituted by King Gustav III. The prize, which consists of a single gold medal, is the most prestigious award that can be awarded by the Swedish Academy. It has been awarded to, among others, Selma Lagerlöf (1904 and 1909), Herbert Tingsten (1966), Astrid Lindgren (1971), Evert Taube (1972) and Tove Jansson (1994).
Other awards
The academy awards around 50 prizes each year. A person does not have to apply nor compete for the prizes.
↑ Store norske leksikon (2005–2007) (6 October 2017). "Svenska Akademien". Store norske leksikon.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
↑ Store norske leksikon (2005–2007) (30 November 2021). "Doblougprisen". Store norske leksikon.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
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