Three members of the secretive committee that selects the winner of the Nobel prize for literature have resigned from the jury in protest at how it has handled the sexual harassment allegations made against a man with close links to the board.
Peter Englund, the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, and the authors Klas Östergren and Kjell Espmark, all separately resigned from the 18-person jury on 6 April. Membership of the Swedish Academy is intended to be for life, so no one has technically left it before.
In 1989, three judges quit when the academy did not denounce Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for the death of author Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses, but the academy declined to accept their resignations. In 2005, judge Knut Ahnlund resigned over the decision to award Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek the year before. However, Ahnlund had not been an active member of the academy since 1996, and his chair was left empty until his death in 2012.
“The Swedish Academy has for a long time had serious problems and has now tried to solve them in a way that puts obscure considerations before its own statutes, which is a betrayal of its founder and patron, and not least its mission to represent genius and taste. Therefore, I have chosen to no longer take part in its activities. I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game,” Östergren told Svenska Dagbladet, according to a translation from Swedish site The Local.
According to the Associated Press, Espmark told Swedish media that “when leading voices in the academy put friendship and other irrelevant considerations before [this] integrity, then I can no longer participate in the work”, while Englund wrote in a letter to Aftonbladet that “decisions have been made that I do not believe in and cannot defend, and I have therefore decided not to participate anymore in the work of the Swedish Academy”.
Englund linked his decision to the academy’s handling of sexual misconduct claims against the artistic director of a literary club in Stockholm to whom the august body has close ties. The man was accused by 18 women of sexual assault and harassment in Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter. The accusations were made in November 2017, and the academy subsequently cut all ties to the man. None of the women reported their accusations to the police. The artistic director has denied all the allegations.
Swedish media linked the row to a vote over whether another academy member with close ties to the man should be excluded from the academy. The three members who left had wanted the other member excluded, but the vote went against them. Academy member Anders Olsson told the broadcaster SVT that “we came to the conclusion that no one is to be excluded. Those who left had another opinion. They were in the minority and I think that’s the main reason they left.”
According to the Local, the permanent secretary of the academy, Sara Danius, has said that the jury is now considering changing its rules and making it possible for members to leave and be replaced.
