The Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for Literature, denied that it had telephoned the Irish author John Banville to inform him of the award, after he was recently informed of a call - which was later found to be deceptive - to learn about it.
The academy began the investigation last week after Banville told the Irish Times that a man had informed him by telephone on October 10 that he had died from the academy and told him he had won the Nobel Prize, before the call turned out to be a hoax.
Malm announced the same day that Polish author Olga Tokarkuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature, and Austrian Peter Handke won the award in 2019.
The trick appeared to be quite perfect because Banville was connected to the academy when he later called the number on his phone screen.
The academy said Banville had been subjected to a ridiculous joke, according to an e-mail to the German news agency DPA, while the record of phone calls out that the phone call was made from one of the phones of the academy.
The academy has criticized the trick, but has no plans to lodge a complaint with the police because there has been no breakthrough.
The prestigious literary body suffered last year to regain its image in Sweden and the world after members of the Academy exchanged harsh criticism in the media and resigned seven of the eighteen members, while the institution found itself without a quorum to take key decisions, for the first time in seventy years, to be postponed the award.
Banville is a writer
Known as a screenwriter, novelist, playwright, literary critic and journalist, he has won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize in 1976, the Booker Prize in 2005, the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2013, and the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in 2014.
Among his most important literary works are three trilogies: a trilogy of revolutions that focused on the great men of science Copernicus, Kepler and Newton;