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Sara Danius, former head of Swedish Academy, dies aged 57

Author, literary scholar and former Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius has died at the age of 57.

Published: 12 October 2019 14:03 CEST

Sara Danius, former head of Swedish Academy, dies aged 57

Sara Danius in 2013. Photo: Bertil Enevåg Ericson / TT

Danius passed away on Saturday morning after a long illness, Swedish media including SVT reported.

“The family deeply mourns her passing and looks back on her life with great gratitude, pride and joy,” her family said in a statement provided to TT.

A professor of literature at Stockholm University and a prominent essayist, Danius published a series of essay collections.

She was best known for her time in the Swedish Academy, however.

After becoming a member in 2013, Danius was later chosen as Permanent Secretary in 2015 – the first woman ever to hold the prestigious post.

”There was a shimmer around her, stylistically and intellectually. The Swedish cultural world will be poorer without her. My thoughts go to her closest family, it is a terrible loss,” Dagens Nyheter culture editor Björn Wiman said in the newspaper’s report of her passing.

Born in 1962, Danius began her career as a journalist before switching to academic studies in the 1990s. She earned her doctorate degree from Uppsala University in 1999 and was appointed Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in 2008.

She became a professor of literature at Stockholm University in 2013, the same year she was chosen as a member of the Swedish Academy.

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

She resigned in 2018 in the wake of a scandal that emerged from the #MeToo movement to halt sexual abuse, and forced the Academy to postpone awarding the literature prize that year.

She later described the events as “one of the biggest culture scandals ever in modern Swedish history”.

READ ALSO: 'Not all traditions are worth preserving': former Swedish Academy head Sara Danius

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'We live in a dangerous time,' says Swedish Academy member of #MeToo

Horace Engdahl, left. Photo: Fredrik Persson/TT

Horace Engdahl, a member and former permanent secretary of what used to be known as Sweden's most prestigious cultural institution, made the comments in an interview with the Times Literary Supplement (TLS).

Engdahl was one of the few members left standing when the Academy was rocked by mass resignations after 18 women last year accused Jean-Claude Arnault, a 72-year-old Frenchman who was an influential figure on Stockholm's cultural scene and had close ties to the Academy, of sexual harassment, violence and rape.

The accusations surfaced in a report by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper during the #MeToo campaign.

Six members left after the Swedish Academy failed to agree on how to handle the situation – with Engdahl understood to have been one of the leading actors behind the ousting of the permanent secretary at the time, Sara Danius. Danius and a number of other members had pushed for tougher action against Arnault and for the resignation of his wife, fellow Academy member and acclaimed poet Katarina Frostenson.

Speaking to TLS in June, Engdahl said he had been reading about the Académie Francaise during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, and found remarkable similarities to the Swedish Academy today.

“Basically it was the same resentment, it was the same attack on privilege, it was also an attack on sexual irregularities, and the use of public funds for financing various forms of luxury and pageantry,” he said.

“I feel we're involved in the same kind of event here, we're in a kind of 1789, and the forces that were released are extremely strong and they're very, very hard to resist.”

“I don't know the number of witnesses who came forward to accuse Marie Antoinette of incest with her children, but it was probably no fewer. We live in this period that is very much defined in Sweden by the onset of the #MeToo movement and the atmosphere that has created,” said Engdahl.

READ ALSO: Let's talk about the Swedish Academy's rapid descent into farce

Engdahl has been described as a friend of Arnault and has spoken fondly of the Frenchman, although he told TLS the pair were never as close as media made them out to be. He said he and Arnault never spoke of any of the rumours about the latter (he previously told Swedish radio “we blokes don't talk about such things”).

“He's a Frenchman, he comes from a different culture, and if it existed [the rumours], it was thought of as a matter of course, in a very conventional way… in a very stupid way.”

Some of the allegations against Arnault have been dropped by investigators, or were never reported in the first place, but Stockholm District Court this month jailed him over the rape of a woman seven years ago.

Arnault denies the rape charge and has appealed to have the verdict overturned.

“I am surprised that a man can be sent to prison without any substantial evidence of his guilt being presented at the trial,” Engdahl told TLS after the verdict. “We live in a dangerous time.”

An internal Academy probe earlier this year concluded there had been conflicts of interest between Arnault and the institution, and the Academy previously confirmed that several female members and people close to them also claimed to have been on the receiving end of inappropriate behaviour by the Frenchman.

After deciding to postpone this year's Nobel Prize in Literature in light of the conflict, the Academy said on Friday it had elected literature expert Mats Malm as a new member. Author Niklas Rådström also told Dagens Nyheter he had been asked to join. The new appointment comes after the Academy voted earlier this month to induct lawyer Eric M Runesson and writer Jila Mossaed to replace some of the members who quit.

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