Former Permanent Secretary, Sture Allen dies aged 93

Hello Gentle Reader,
 
The Swedish Academy’s membership is once again going to experience further change at the recent death of computational linguist and former Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sture Allén who died earlier this week at the age of 93. Through the latter half of the 1980’s and the vast majority of the 1990’s, Sture Allén held the position of Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, functioning as the academy’s spokesperson and operational face. Throughout Allén’s exceptionally lengthy reign, the Swedish Academy went through a series of controversial turbulent times, beginning in 1988 during the Rushdie Affair (or “The Satanic Verses,” Controversy) when the Swedish Academy remained silent regarding the fatwa issued against Saman Rushdie. The incident was a standing point where writers and activists across the world, rallied against the death threat and sentence issued against Rushdie, with many citing decrying the order as a baseless attack against freedom of speech, expression, thought, and one’s ability to have oppositional or opposing views to others dogmatic decrees. As a literary institute, there was a reasonable expectation that the Swedish Academy would condemn the death threat issued against Salman Rushdie. Under Sture Allén, however, the Swedish Academy remained inactive and silent, which resulted in three members (at the time) symbolically resigning from their positions on the Academy, these three members were: Werner Aspenström (Chair No. 12), former Permanent Secretary Lars Gyllensten (Chair No. 14), and Kerstin Ekman (Chair No. 15). This could be described as Sture Allén’s first example of moral failure. In the 1990’s, Sture Allén would receive a letter detailing sordid allegations of sexual assault committed by a husband of a former committee member (Katarina Frostenson); Allén disregarded the letter, which in the coming decades would come back to haunt the Swedish Academy with the 2018 scandal blowing apart the institution which was known as being stoic and secretive, and in turn revealed an archaic organization with a rotting festering underbelly of moral and ethical ineptitude, but could hide behind the gold, the gilding, and the Nobel Prize to hid their own putrid realities. In the end, the late and former Sara Danius suffered the negligence and inattentiveness of Sture Allén’s inaction. Yet, during the late 80’s and 90’s (with minor exceptions) the Nobel Prize for Literature was aptly awarded to some of the greatest writers and most recognizable laureates of the time: Naguib Mahfouz, Octavio Paz, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, and the marvelous Wislwa Szymborska. It was also during this time; the Nobel Prize for Literature truly began to take on a more global perspective. In this Sture Allé can be praised for finishing the job of taking the Nobel Prize for Literature to further global reaches and achieve some sense of synthesis beyond its own provincialism and centric view of literature in a very narrow confines, and instead take a holistic approach to the application of the Nobel Prize for Literature and Alfred Nobel’s will and testament, while treating the award as if it were a traditional literary award. In turn, Sture Allén’s reign would not be described as one without corrupting questions of lacking moral probity and ethical consideration. In fact these two facets remain the darkest and deepest blemishes on computational linguists legacy and memory.
 
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary