Private, weekly meetings

 

Over the course of the working year, the Academy meets every Thursday at 5 p.m. in its session room at the Stock Exchange Building. These weekly meetings, which usually last about an hour and a half, are closed sessions; that is to say, none but Academicians may attend. The only exceptions to this mentioned in the statutes are the Academy’s patron, H.M. the King and ‘kings or the children of foreign kings who wish to bestow that honour upon the Academy’.

 
The Session room at the Swedish Academy. Photo: Rickard L. Eriksson

The agenda at a normal weekly meeting usually consists of around fifteen items, and meetings are largely devoted to discussing the many prizes and scholarships awarded by the Academy. The normal procedure is that the candidates for an award are nominated at a first meeting, after which the members are given time for consideration, before a decision is made at the Thursday meeting two weeks later.

The matter of the Nobel Prize is brought up on many occasions throughout the working year. In the spring, the Nobel Committee’s lists of nominations and final candidates are discussed and determined. In the early autumn, a final decision is made and the name of the laureate announced, after which preparations begin for the award ceremony on 10 December.

However, the agenda also includes many matters relating to the Academy’s internal affairs. Frequently recurring items include the Academy’s finances, linguistic work and literary publications, as well as reports from the various project groups such as the editorial staff of the Dictionary and Word List. During the final months of the year, preparations are made for the Academy’s Annual Grand Ceremony on 20 December.

Many different outside parties petition the Academy with various kinds of requests. Applications for financial support to scientific and cultural institutions, events and projects are common, and researchers often ask for permission to see documents from the Academy archives. Occasionally, the State conducts investigations into the Academy’s business activities. Matters of this kind are usually dealt with at the weekly meetings, having generally been prepared in advance by the secretariat.

The director chairs the meetings, while the secretary presents the items on the agenda. Although decisions are normally discussed and arrived at by consensus, votes may also be counted. In the event of a tie, the secretary casts the deciding vote. For a decision to be valid, there must be a quorum of seven members including at least one of the Academy’s officials (the director, chancellor or secretary). The secretary is responsible for writing down the minutes after every meeting. These are relatively brief and do not normally detail the discussions that precede decisions. The minutes of the Swedish Academy are still to this day hand-written by the secretary and later bound into annual volumes kept in the Academy archives. The minutes, like all other documents relating to the Academy’s internal affairs, are subject to complete confidentiality.

While attendance at the weekly meetings is, in principle, unpaid, the statutes prescribe that at each meeting the Academy shall be awarded eighteen silver tokens (jetons) bearing the image of the founder, these to be distributed equally among the members present. Any unallocated tokens are saved for the next meeting, at which a further eighteen are issued. The tokens may either be retained by members or exchanged for cash. While these were originally of not inconsiderable value, they nowadays yield only a symbolic monetary sum. In addition to receiving a jeton, members are compensated for the costs they incur as a direct result of attending the meetings, primarily with regard to travel expenses.