A New Millennium (2000-)
The turn of the millennium passed without any great drama for the Swedish Academy. The most obvious change was that the Academy gained a new neighbour within the Stock Exchange Building. This was on account of the Stockholm Stock Exchange leaving its premises on the lower floors and being replaced by the newly established Nobel Museum (nowadays known as the Nobel Prize Museum), which opened its doors in 2001. Another development was that the Academy, in keeping with the times, launched its own website.
Otherwise, it was mostly a case of continuing the work that had already begun in expanding the Academy’s linguistic and the literary activities. While a number of new prizes had already been added throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, more were now introduced – the Swedish Academy’s Librarianship Prize and the Swedish Teaching Prize, to name but two. In addition, the Academy’s organising of events, along with its own book publication activities, continued apace. The series of Evenings at the Swedish Academy first introduced in the 1980s was moreover now in full swing, as indeed were the various lectures and literary discussion circles organised by the Nobel Library.
The Academy continued to expand its book publication activities based on the Swedish Classics series that had been introduced in the 1990s. In addition, an increasing number of separate titles were published, ranging from small-scale prints to considerably more elaborate works. In recent years, these have included such notable publications as The Stock Exchange Building: From Town Hall to Swedish Academy Residence by Fredric Bedoire and the richly illustrated anthology entitled A Bridge of Poetry, which was distributed to six-year-olds throughout Sweden in the autumn of 2021.
The digital revolution has brought with it a number of new work duties and opportunities for the members and staff of the Academy, not least those resulting from its linguistic projects. In 2017, the svenska.se web portal was launched, which allows searches to be performed simultaneously in the Swedish Academy’s three major dictionary project areas: the Swedish Academy Word List (SAOL), the Swedish Dictionary published by the Swedish Academy (SO) and the Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB). The Swedish Academy Grammar (SAG) and other downloadable resources have also been made available. Both SAOL and SO are moreover available as mobile apps.
The literary historian and author Horace Engdahl, having been elected Permanent Secretary in 1999, remained in the role until his replacement by the historian Peter Englund in 2009. In 2015, Englund was, in turn, succeeded by the first woman to hold the position: the literary researcher and author Sara Danius.
During late autumn 2017 and spring 2018, the Academy underwent a severe crisis. This was after it had been revealed that the spouse of one of its members – also the artistic director of a cultural association supported financially by the Academy – had sexually assaulted a large number of women and exploited his Academy connections for the purposes of exerting power over them. Following a period of internal strife, several members left their positions, among them the Permanent Secretary. She was replaced by the literary historian and poet Anders OIsson, who in June 2019 was himself succeeded by the literary historian and translator Mats Malm.
As a result of the crisis, the award of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature was postponed until the following year, when the winner was announced at the same time as that of the 2019 prize. In 2018, the Academy instead dedicated itself to a programme of internal change with the aim of making itself more transparent to the outside world. This work has, among other measures, led to a partial reinterpretation of the statutes and to the publishing of annual activity reports, which are to include detailed financial statements.
From the 1990s onwards, there has been a clear tendency towards a more even gender distribution in terms of both members and award recipients. Seven women received the Nobel Prize in Literature during the first two decades of this century, as compared to a total of eight female recipients throughout the whole of the twentieth century. A similar pattern of change exists with regard to Academy members. Today, a third of these are women, which corresponds with the total number of women elected during the whole of the previous century.