There will be no winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, the Swedish Academy has announced. The decision comes after months of bitter infighting over a sexual abuse scandal. Two winners will instead be announced in 2019.
The crisis revolves around allegations of sexual assault by the French photographer Jean-Claude Arnault, whose wife, the poet Katarina Frostenson, resigned her membership of the Academy in April. Her resignation followed that of the Academy’s head and four other members, a bloodletting accompanied by heated public debate in the Swedish media. Arnault denies the accusations.
In a statement published on its website, the Academy cited ‘the currently diminished Academy and the reduced public confidence in the Academy’ as reasons for the decision. The Nobel Prize in Literature is the only one of the prizes affected by the decision, because the process of judging the prizes in other disciplines is handled by a panel of experts in each field rather than the Academy’s members.
4 May
