Swedish Academy will not give Nobel Prize in literature this year amid scandal: report

The 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature has been postponed due to a sexual misconduct and financial scandal that has rocked the institution that traditionally organizes the award.

The Swedish Academy announced Friday that the award would be presented in 2019 as the Academy comes to grips with sexual assault and harassment allegations surrounding Jean-Claude Arnault, a photographer and husband of an Academy member who has attended a number of Academy events.

{mosads}Arnault, along with his wife, runs a cultural forum in Sweden that receives funds from the Academy, which cut all ties with him and began an investigation after the claims surfaced. Among the most serious of the claims is an allegation that the Academy was warned about a sexual assault at Arnault’s forum in 1996, but did nothing.

The Academy “deeply regrets that the letter was shelved and no measures taken to investigate the charges,” the organization said in April of the decades-old allegation.

Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary, was ousted from her position earlier this year, which many claimed was a result of her efforts to investigate the matter. She was replaced by Anders Olsson, who said the Academy would postpone this year’s awards “out of respect.”

“We find it necessary to commit time to recovering public confidence in the academy before the next laureate can be announced,” Olsson said in a statement. He said the academy was acting “out of respect for previous and future literature laureates, the Nobel Foundation and the general public.”

The 2018 award will be announced next year alongside the 2019 recipient, the Academy states. The last year the award was postponed was in 1943, CNN reports, at the height of World War II.

The 2017 winner was Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born British author of “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go.”