The Swedish Academy, with its credibility shattered by a scandal, could not award a prize last year. This year, it will award two. It would have been better to let the gap in the record stand

After cancelling last year’s Nobel prize in literature because of a high-profile scandal in its ranks, the Swedish Academy is making up for lost ground by awarding two this year. A double award is not unprecedented – it has happened before, in 1917, 1966 and 1974 – but on the earlier occasions the money was split. This year’s decision is a mistake. As the former permanent secretary, Sara Danius, suggested, the prize for 2018 should have been left as a gap in the record, as an acknowledgment of the scandal.

Since last year’s debacle, oceans of ink have been spilled debating whether the secretive Academy is in any fit state to remain the world’s premier arbiter on world literature. In response to these criticisms, the Nobel Foundation has, in effect, purged the Academy of most of the key figures in the scandal that convulsed it last year, among them Ms Danius (who exposed it), and brought in five independent members to help the prize committee in its deliberations. But, entertaining as the continuing ructions are, they are a sideshow to the central question: do we actually need a Nobel prize in literature any more, or would the 9m kroner (£731,000) be better spent on, say, initiatives to save the planet from environmental catastrophe? The addition of a new category might not seem heretical: economics was only added in 1969 to the big five stipulated in Alfred Nobel’s will. However, the Nobel Foundation has set its face against any further new prizes and discouraged the unauthorised use of its name.

Like them or not, the Nobels have a historic status, and to take literature out of the family, leaving medicine, chemistry, economics, physics and peace, would be to create a fracture line with a symbolism far bigger and more important than the money involved. Canny old arms manufacturer that he was, Nobel knew what he was doing when he gave literature equal standing with peace and science. It plays a critical role in the ethical ecology. You only need to look at the work of a few previous winners to see this principle in action: Svetlana Alexievich’s witnesses to the fallout from Russia’s big ambitions; Kazuo Ishiguro’s explorations of identity at the end of empire. Or, going further back, Pablo Neruda’s articulation of Latin America’s stubborn soul.

In our increasingly bewildering universe, literature also imagines into being things that are later proved to exist: just look at the relationship between science fiction and the frontiers of physics. The physicist James Kakalios even wrote a book called The Physics of Superheroes, in which he argued that writers of comics in the 1930s beat future generations of quantum physicists to the conceptual breakthroughs that are now keeping us in MRI scanners and CDs. Great scientists have always recognised this phenomenon. The Hungarian mathematician George Pólya went so far as to enshrine it in his inventor’s paradox, which noted that progress was often based on a vision of things beyond those immediately present.

Science fiction has not often been rewarded by the Swedish Academy (Harry Martinson’s prize was an obvious exception); for critics this is one of its oversights. The default has been firmly Eurocentric: 102 of 114 prizes have gone to European languages. There have been some downright bad choices. But, to invert the inventor’s paradox, you can’t fix something if it no longer exists. The world needs literature, and literature needs to be seen and cherished and even – just occasionally – given a really big pat on the back to demonstrate that we still know it matters.