Ms. Danius was not rewarded for her efforts at accountability. Several members of the academy, including some of Ms Danius’s allies, resigned in disgust over the allegations, and Ms. Danius was herself forced out from the top post, although she remains a member of the academy. (On the same day, Ms. Frostenson also stepped down.)

Ms. Danius’s demotion prompted mass protests by critics who said that a woman had been scapegoated for the sexual misconduct of a man, and that Ms. Danius had been punished for trying to introduce openness and accountability to a group that preferred to close ranks.

[Read more about the Swedish Academy’s crisis here.]

With the academy depleted by resignations, and its secretive workings exposed to unflattering scrutiny, the Nobel Foundation, which manages the industrialist Alfred Nobel’s legacy and oversees all of the awards, stepped in to warn that the scandal risked tarnishing the prizes as a whole.

“The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize,” Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, said in a statement early Friday. He said that while the award was intended to be awarded yearly, it should be postponed when the group choosing winners had a problem “so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible.”

Until Friday, the academy had insisted that it was sticking to its usual schedule, winnowing potential laureates to a shortlist by summer and anointing a prize winner in October. “But confidence in the academy from the world around us has sunk drastically in the past half year,” the acting permanent secretary, the literary scholar Anders Olsson, told Swedish Radio on Friday, “and that is the decisive reason that we are postponing the prize.”

Another member, the historian Peter Englund, wrote in an email: “I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the Academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?”

Mats Svegfors, a well-known editor and publisher, now retired, said the affair threatened to damage Sweden as a whole.