As the world’s most important literary prize, the choice of Nobel Prize for Literature winners has undergone a major change with the 2018 scandal involving members of the awarding body, the Swedish Academy of Letters. With one-third of the jury members being women, the Nobel Prize for Literature is set to enter a new era under the leadership of its new permanent secretary, Matthias Malm. Since its founding in 1786, the Swedish Academy of Letters has maintained a tradition of 18 members. The motto of this old-fashioned, traditional institution in the service of the Swedish royal family is “Genius and Taste”, and all academicians are elected anonymously for life, with no possibility of voluntary resignation until 2018.
Since 1901, the Swiss Academy of Arts and Letters has been the selector of the Nobel Prize in Literature, financed by the Nobel Foundation, which was established under the will of Alfred Nobel. Each year, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to 18 members of the Academy, who are nominated by a large list of external candidates, and then a long list of 4-5 members of the jury, who vote on the final selection. The position of Permanent Secretary of the Academy is held by an academician, and the Permanent Secretary acts as the representative of the Swedish Academy to announce the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in October of each year.
Although the Permanent Secretary has no special power in the Swedish Academy, the personal taste of the Permanent Secretary is considered to have a very close relationship with the selection of the Nobel Prize in Literature. For example, Horace Engdahl, who served as the Permanent Secretary from 1999 to 2009, once openly stated that he was a “Eurocentrist” and had some criticisms of American literature, believing that the American literary world did not like to translate international works, was isolated from the world, and did not participate in the broader international literary dialogue.
His comments come at a time when no American writer won the Nobel Prize between 1999 and 2009, and all ten winners, except for South African J.M. Kutcher, who moved to Australia, reside in Europe. Ndahl resigned as permanent secretary in 2009, retaining only his seat as an academician, in response to the controversy over his statement.
Endahl was also the last permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy of Letters to serve for more than ten years. Before that, ten years or more had been the norm, and more than twenty had been common. Before Endahl, another permanent secretary who left his post due to controversy was Lars Gyllensten.
A halfway decent doctor and a lover of literature with very pure tastes, Gyllensten awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to a number of lesser-known writers from the Czech Republic, such as Seyfert, Poland’s Miłosz, Italy’s Canetti, and Colombia’s García Márquez from the time he assumed the post in 1977. García Márquez was still in the middle of his career when he won the award in 1982, with only one successful full-length novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In 1986, Gillenstein left the Swedish Academy of Letters in anger over the Academy’s failure to give enough support to Saruman Rushdie, who had been given a death ultimatum by religious zealots, and has not been involved in the activities of the Swedish Academy of Letters since then, and because the academicians were not able to resign from their positions in that year, Gillenstein became what is known as a “zombie academician”, not participating in the activities and meetings, and occupying an empty seat. Meeting, occupying an empty seat.
From the beginning of the establishment of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy of Letters has had many disagreements with other literary and cultural circles, including differences in taste, but also differences in the interpretation of Alfred Nobel’s ideology. A typical example is the Russian writer Tolstoy, who was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize for Literature in the first decade of the early twentieth century, but never won the prize, partly because the Nobel Committee at that time considered that Tolstoy’s works did not conform to the “lofty idealism” of Alfred Nobel’s original intent. At that time, many people in the literary world, especially in the Swedish literary world, wrote a joint petition to express their dissatisfaction, but this does not change the Nobel Prize for Literature, like almost all literary prizes, really only represents the personal taste of the 18 academicians in office to choose and compromise. For example, Anders Österling, the literary critic, poet and translator, who was the longest-serving member of the Swedish Academy of Letters, becoming a member at the age of 35, was awarded the prize for several of his translations into Swedish during his 62-year tenure as permanent secretary, especially from 1941 to 1964, including T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Donnell, Eugene O’Donnell, and many of his fellow writers, including T. S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, Hermann Hesse, Salvador Quasimodo and other great writers who are now household names. Through the platform of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ostling’s tastes in a sense characterized the literary tastes of an era.
It was also during this era that many politically controversial writers such as André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and even Winston Churchill were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s worth noting that Chinese author Mo Yan was able to win the prize, no doubt as a direct result of the presence of the late Swedish sinologist Ma Yueran as a member of the Swedish Academy of Letters.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to American folk singer Bob Dylan in 2016 was perhaps the most surprising in the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which came during the tenure of Sara Danius, the first female permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy of Letters. While the singer had never previously won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was not considered to be in the category of consideration for the award, Danius, who died in 2019 after a long illness, had expressed the fact that she was a fan of Dylan in a number of public appearances.
Two years later, also during Dennius’ tenure, the Swedish Academy of Letters was confronted with an unprecedented scandal related to that year’s “Me Too” movement. Jean-Claude Arnault, the French-born author husband of Katarina Frostenson, a female academician and poet, was accused of sexually harassing a number of women, including the Princess of Sweden, and Frostenson was accused of revealing award lists to her husband so that he could bet on his winnings. Arnaud was later sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison, while a vote by the Swedish Academy of Letters not to expel Frostensohn led to several veteran academicians resigning voluntarily. Because of his perceived mishandling of the affair, Danius was blamed by other academicians, especially several former permanent secretaries, and had to leave his position in 2018, to be replaced temporarily by another academician, Anders Olsson.
This huge scandal took place during a time when the Nobel Prize for Literature was not awarded on time in 2018, for the first time since World War II, and the reputation of the Swedish Academy of Letters and the Nobel Prize for Literature Committee took a considerable hit. It was also in 2018 that the Swedish royal family changed the Academy’s guidelines to allow academicians to resign voluntarily.
Among the current 18 academicians of the Swedish Academy of Letters, two seats are vacant due to the death of academicians this year, and among the other 16 seats, the youngest is 53 years old, the oldest is 88 years old, and among them, there are six women, all of whom were elected after the scandal broke out in 2018, and the number of people reached one-third of the 18 seats, which is a change from the situation of the Swedish Academy of Letters in the past, which was dominated by middle-aged and old-aged men. As a result, the style of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature has undergone another sea change, with female writers now accounting for a three-fifths majority since 2018, and topics of contemporary importance such as the identity politics of minorities and women’s experience of the body are clearly being added to the Nobel Committee’s criteria for the prize as factors to be considered.
The French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, would probably not have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in terms of her taste in the Ndahl or Gillenstein eras, but the composition of the members of the Swedish Academy of Literature has changed significantly, with one-third of the members of the Academy being women, and the proportion of the members of the Academy being higher than that of the members of the Swedish Academy, in fact, because of the situation of the “zombie members”. However, there has been a significant change in the composition of the members of the Swedish Academy of Letters, where women account for one-third of the membership, and in fact, because of the “zombie academician” situation, account for a much higher proportion of the Nobel Committee, frank female physical and emotional experience through the novels of Aino, which might previously have been regarded as “middlebrow”, was accepted into the traditional literary criteria.
This trend is not exclusive to the Nobel Prize for Literature; the film Happening, based on Eino’s novel, won the Golden Bear at the Venice Film Festival last year, also demonstrating a significant detachment of current authoritative aesthetic trends from traditional modes of criticism.
At 58 years old, the new permanent secretary Mats Malm, who was elected to the academy in 2018, is the fourth permanent secretary in the past decade, and it is difficult to know how long his tenure will last, but the all-encompassing transformation of the Nobel Prize for Literature is a fact that cannot be reversed.