The old Stock Exchange Building, home of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday May 3, 2018. For the first time since 1943, there's a notable risk that no Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded this year. (Fredrik Sandberg/TT via AP)
The old Stock Exchange Building, home of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday May 3, 2018. For the first time since 1943, there's a notable risk that no Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded this year. (Fredrik Sandberg/TT via AP) Credit: Fredrik Sandberg/TT

Copenhagen, Denmark — Following weeks of internal bickering, sex-abuse allegations and a financial investigation by police, the body that hands out the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature announced on Friday that no prize will be awarded this year.

Instead, the academy said two Nobel Prizes in Literature will be handed out next year, the 2018 prize and the 2019 prize. The decision was made on Thursday at a weekly meeting of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the grounds that the group was in too deep a crisis to choose a Nobel winner properly.

“The present crisis of confidence places high demands on a long-term and robust work for change,” said Anders Olsson, the academy’s permanent secretary. “We find it necessary to commit time to recovering public confidence in the Academy before the next laureate can be announced.”

It will be the first time since 1949 that the prestigious award has been delayed.

“It has occurred before. This year we’re doing it because we’ve had a very, very unusual situation, with conflicts in the academy and a weakened academy in terms of the number of members,” Olsson told Sweden’s TT news agency.

The internal feud within the academy — which only hands out one of the Nobel prizes — was triggered by an abuse scandal linked to Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden who is also the husband of poet Katarina Frostenson, an academy member.

The academy has admitted that “unacceptable behavior in the form of unwanted intimacy” took place within its ranks.