Controversy stalks Nobel Peace, Literature prizes

STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — Controversy stalks the Nobel prizes for peace and literature in a way it rarely does for science.

The revamped panel at the Swedish Academy who will hand out the Nobel Literature prizes Thursday for both 2018 and 2019 would relish arguments about the winners, rather than intrigue about the #MeToo scandal that forced the institution to suspend the prize last year.

And U.S. President Donald Trump has done his part to kindle intrigue about the 2019 Peace Prize winner, by simultaneously seeming to pitch himself for the prize while also slamming the Norwegian panel that awards it.

"Controversy is a natural effect of the Literature Prize," says Mats Malm, the Swedish Academy's new permanent secretary, appointed to head a reformed 18-person panel after two years of convulsions at the prestigious institution. "We want to contribute to the international discussion about literature and what it is supposed to be."

The literary science professor is leading an overhaul of the body, which was ripped apart in late 2017 and 2018 by sex assaults involving Jean-Claude Arnault , the French husband of a former academy member and a once-notable figure on Sweden's cultural scene.

Arnault was convicted last year of two rapes in 2011 but not before accusations of abuse had led to a mass exodus of academy committee members, the ouster of then-Permanent Secretary Sara Danius, and the absence of a Nobel Literature prize for the first time since 1943 at the height of World War II.

With a threat hanging from the Nobel Foundation — the body behind the Nobel Prizes — that the Swedish Academy could be stripped of its right to award the prize, the academy brought in five external members to help adjudicate the two literature awards this year. At the same time, it ousted everyone involved in the scandal and it "no...