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Swedish Academy

Swedish Royal Academy

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History

The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786 by King Gustav III. It is modelled after the Académie française and has 18 members. It is said that Gustaf III originally intended there to be twenty members, half the number of those in the French Academy, but eventually decided on eighteen because the Swedish expression De Aderton – 'The Eighteen' – had such a fine solemn ring. The academy's motto is "Talent and Taste" (Swedish: Snille och smak), and its stated primary purpose is to "work on the Swedish language's purity, strength and sublimity".

The academy's statutes was drawn up by Gustav III himself. The specified tasks for the Academy included to compile a dictionary of the Swedish language and arrange annual competitions in oratory and poetry on given themes. Moreover, Gustav instructed that the Academy would hold an annual grand ceremony on 20 December, and that a medal would be struck every year to commemorate a prominent Swede.

In the wake of Gustav's death in 1792 the standings of the academy deteriorated, but the institution nevertheless managed to maintain its position as the nations highest authority in literary and linguistic matters.

After having flourished in the mid-19th century, by the end of the century the academy, fiercely negative to new literary movements, had deteriorated and was not looked upon favourably.

After some initial hesitation, by the turn of the 20th century the academy accepted the task of awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, and soon after a modernisation of the academy began with several new school writers and its first female member, Selma Lagerlöf, elected.

Headquarters

The building now known as the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building was built for the bourgeoisie. The bottom floor was used as a trading exchange (this later became the stock exchange), and the upper floor was used for balls, New Year's Eve parties, etc. When the academy was founded, the ballroom was the biggest room in Stockholm that could be heated and thus used in the winter, so the King asked if he could borrow it.

The academy has had its annual meeting there every year since, attended by members of the Swedish royal family. However, it was not until 1914 that the academy gained permanent use of the upper floor as their own. It is here that the academy meets and, among other business, announces the names of Nobel Prize laureates. This task arguably makes the academy one of the world's most influential literary bodies.

The Swedish King is the only person who, apart from the members, has the right to attend the meetings of the academy. On 3 March 2022 the Swedish King attended a weekly academy meeting, the first time a Swedish king has done so in over 200 years.

Members

Members are elected by a secret ballot in the Academy and before the result is made public it must be submitted to the Academy's Patron, the King of Sweden, for his approval. Members of the Academy include writers, linguists, literary scholars, historians and a prominent jurist. Initially writers were in the minority in the Academy, but during the twentieth century the number of writers grew to represent more than half of The Eighteen. The Swedish Academy has a long history of being a heavily male-dominated institution, but the Academy has recently moved towards better equality. Since 20 December 2019 one third of the chairs belong to female Academy members.

Prior to 2018 it was not possible for members of the academy to resign; membership was for life, although the academy could decide to exclude members. This happened twice to Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt, who was excluded in 1794, re-elected in 1805 and excluded again in 1811. In 1989, members Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten chose to stop participating in the meetings of the academy, over its refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned him to death for The Satanic Verses, shortly after a third member, Werner Aspenström, also stopped participating in the meetings for unspecified reasons. In 2005, Knut Ahnlund made the same decision, as a protest against the choice of Elfriede Jelinek as Nobel laureate for 2004, calling her work "unenjoyable, violent pornography", and stating that awarding her the prize had "caused irreparable harm to the value of the award for the foreseeable future". On 25 November 2017, Lotta Lotass said in an interview that she had not participated in the meetings of the academy for more than two years and did not consider herself a member any more.

Assets

Dag Hammarskjöld's former farm at Backåkra, close to Ystad in southern Sweden, was bought in 1957 as a summer residence by Hammarskjöld, then Secretary-General of the United Nations (1953–1961). The south wing of the farm is reserved as a summer retreat for the 18 members of the Swedish Academy, of which Hammarskjöld was a member.

On 11 April 2019, the academy published its financial statements for the first time in its history. According to it, the academy owned financial assets worth 1.58 billion Swedish kronor at the end of 2018 (equal to $170M, €150M, or £130M).

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