STOCKHOLM: Swedish scholar Sara Danius stepped down on Tuesday from the academy that awards the Nobel literature prize, almost a year after she quit as its permanent secretary amid a sex scandal unveiled by the #MeToo movement.

The academic’s resignation is the latest development in an affair that sprang from the movement to highlight sexual abuse, and forced the academy to postpone awarding the literature prize in 2018.

“I have decided to give up my seat... once occupied by the first woman elected to the Academy, Selma Lagerloef,” Danius, 56, said in a statement. “It has been an honour,” she added, without giving a reason for her decision.

In April 2018, Danius was forced to step down as the academy’s permanent secretary, the first woman to hold that position, owing to a scandal sparked by Jean-Claude Arnault, an influential figure on Stockholm’s cultural scene.

He was convicted of raping a young woman in October and December 2011, and the academy was caught up in the affair because Arnault was married to one of its members, Katarina Frostenson, who has also resigned.

Arnault, who is French, was accused by 18 women in a statement to respected Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, but has appealed his conviction to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

The Swedish Academy had generously funded Arnault’s Forum club, which was popular among aspiring young authors hoping to make contact with publishers and writers, and he had boasted he was its “19th member.” Danius, a scholar at Stockholm University, joined the academy in 2013 and became its permanent secretary two years later.

As such she was the voice of the body that awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievitch, US songwriter Bob Dylan and British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.

Her departure highlights a rift in the academy between those who seek to revive it and an ageing male-dominated clique alleged to sustain a culture of silence that had protected Arnault.

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2019