Controversy stalks Nobels — again

Scandinavian prizes for peace and literature stir up buzz that’s rarely matched in equivalent awards for science

Controversy stalks the Nobel prizes for peace and literature in a way it rarely does for science.

The revamped panel at the Swedish Academy who will hand out the Nobel Literature prizes this week for both 2018 and 2019 would relish arguments about the winners, rather than intrigue about the #MeToo scandal that forced the institution to suspend the prize last year.

And United States President Donald Trump has done his part to kindle intrigue about the 2019 peace prize winner, by simultaneously seeming to pitch himself for the prize while also slamming the Norwegian panel that awards it.

“Controversy is a natural effect of the Literature Prize,” says Mats Malm, the Swedish Academy’s new permanent secretary, appointed to head a reformed 18-person panel after two years of tremors at the institution.

“We want to contribute to the international discussion about literature and what it is supposed to be.”

The literary science professor is leading an overhaul of the body ripped apart in late 2017 and 2018 by sex assaults involving Jean-Claude Arnault, married to an ex-academy member and a once-notable figure on Sweden’s cultural scene.

Arnault was convicted last year of two 2011 rapes but not before abuse accusations had led to an exodus of academy committee members, the ousting of then-Permanent Secretary Sara Danius and the absence of a Nobel Literature prize for the first time since 1943, during World War II.

With a threat from the Nobel Foundation — the body behind the Nobel Prizes — that the Swedish Academy could be stripped of its right to award the prize, the academy brought in five external members to help adjudicate the two literature awards this year.

At the same time, it ousted everyone involved in the scandal and it “no longer includes any members who are subject to conflicts of interest or criminal investigations”, according to the foundation.

Across the border, the fiveperson Norwegian Nobel Institute that oversees the peace prize usually claims not to enjoy the controversy that accompanies its choices. But

Geir Lundestad, the nonvoting secretary of the committee from 1990 to 2014, says some members have traditionally thrived on the controversies that the high-profile prize inevitably brings. “I am not sure the differences between the two committees are so big. The literature and peace prizes are more accessible to ordinary people than the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry,” he says. “Some of the members enjoy the controversy that brings. It varies tremendously between members. But many recognise that some sort of controversy goes with the territory.”

Nobel committees never reveal the names of candidates and nominations are not revealed for 50 years.

Lundestad was in charge when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former US President Barack Obama within months of his inauguration in 2009 — a prize that has attracted the ire of Trump, his successor.

Obama was there “for about 15 seconds” before he was awarded the prize, Trump said in February. Trump has been nominated for the peace prize by US Congressmen for opening a dialogue with North Korea.

“I’ll probably never get it, but that’s okay,” Trump said. “They gave it to Obama. He didn’t even know what he got it for.”

Second-guessing the thinking of the secretive panel is rarely fruitful, but the committee is not immune to the charms of US Presidents. As well as Obama, Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906, Woodrow Wilson took the prize in 1920 and Jimmy Carter was chosen for the award in 2002.

On the literature side, the British website Nicer Odds has solved the dilemma of having two winners announced this year by only taking bets on the 2019 winner. Among the favourites are Canadian poet Anne Carson, novelists Maryse Conde of Guadeloupe and Can Xue of China and Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s

Tale, now made into a hit TV series. The Nobel week began overnight (NZT) with the awards for physiology or medicine. The physics prize is next, then chemistry, followed by the double-header literature prizes before the peace prize.

The economics prize — officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which is the only prize not created by the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite — will be awarded on October 14.

Nobel’s reason for having an institution in Norway hand out the peace prize while others are awarded in Sweden is unclear, but during his lifetime the two nations were in a union, which was dissolved in 1905.

Nobel fame this year comes with a 9 million krona ($1.4m) cash award, a gold medal and a diploma, presented at ceremonies on December 10 — the anniversary of

Nobel’s death in 1896.