Yesterday Kristoffer Leandoer wrote in Svenska Dagbladet that he is leaving the Swedish Academy's external committee. The reason he states is that the change work is going too slowly and that the arrangement with the external committee has not worked as intended. Shortly thereafter, Gun-Britt Sundström in Dagens Nyheter announced that she is also leaving. It was in November last year that an external committee was set up, at the initiative of the Nobel Foundation, to assist in the award work.
-The external committee was a solution that the Nobel Foundation wanted to bring about. In fact, academy members opposed a combination of external and internal members. The foundation pressed on and now you see what happened, says SvD's literature editor Madeleine Levy.
How serious is this?
-It intensifies the conflict between the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish Academy, which Madeleine says was the Nobel Foundation's construction. They were probably a little naive when they thought that the external committee would work autonomously from the Academy, so it certainly has not been, says DN's cultural director Björn Wiman.
What are the consequences?
"It shows that it is difficult to build something consistent and sustainable on a rotten basis," says Björn Wiman.
Kristoffer Leandoer believes that the Academy's change work is going too slowly. Isn't it high expectations for an institution that has been around for so many years?
- The problem is rather that we do not know. This is still the case with transparency. They still have not gone out and said that this is what we will do with this time span. The ambiguity harms the Academy, says Madeleine Levy.