Stockholm (AFP)

The essayist Sara Danius, the first woman to become permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who was at the head of the institution when a sexual abuse scandal broke out, died on Saturday. cancer suites.

Sara Danius, who in 2014 had announced suffering from breast cancer, "died (...) at 57 years," told the AFP Academy.

His death comes just two days after the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy awarded the Polish Literature Prize 2018, Olga Tokarczuk, and the 2019 Prize to Austria's Peter Handke.

Professor of literature at the University of Stockholm, Sara Danius entered the Academy in 2013 and became two years later the permanent secretary, the first woman to hold the post since the creation of the "Svenska Akademien" in 1786.

Prestigious function that has made this passionate fashion intellectual the voice and face of the academy during the announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature in front of the cameras worldwide between 2015 and 2017.

She presided at the coronation of Belarusian Svetlana Alexievitch, but especially at that of the American singer Bob Dylan, a choice assumed by Sara Danius but which had aroused strong reactions in the world of letters.

In October 2017, the academy awarded the Nobel Prize to the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, perceived as the expression of a return to orthodoxy for a heckled cenacle both inside and outside.

But a few weeks later, in the midst of the #MeToo movement, 18 women were accused of harassment and aggression, in a column published by the leading daily Dagens Nyheter, an influential figure on the Swedish cultural scene.

Married to an academician, Jean-Claude Arnault, a septuagenarian Frenchman, also received generous subsidies from the academy, boasted of being the "19th member" and, according to witnesses, blew the names of the future Nobel laureates to his friends.

The scandal exposed the opaque functioning of the academy, the rivalry between its members, the denunciation by Sara Danius of the forces of "patriarchy" at work within it, and the culture of silence that protected the French.

The Swedish Academy has since suffered a haemorrhage of limbs. Mrs. Danius herself had abandoned her prerogatives as perpetual secretary in April 2018 while maintaining her chair.

Deprived of the quorum of sitting members provided for in its bylaws to designate a winner, she had to postpone the 2018 Nobel 2018 announcement for the first time since the Second World War.

Since vacancies have been filled, the statutes of the academy reformed.

In February 2019, Sara Danius announced that she was definitely returning her chair to the academy.

© 2019 AFP