| Sumario: | This article examines authorial ethos in Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson's literary response to the crisis in the Swedish Academy 2017–2018, marked by allegations of misconduct and by institutional upheaval. Through a textual analysis of Frostenson's quartet K (2019), F – en färd (2020, "F – a journey"), A. Andra tankar (2021, "A. Other thoughts"), and Alma (2023), the article traces how these works constitute a literary scandal in its own right through their presentation of a counternarrative. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the literary field and Liesbeth Korthals Altes' work on ethos, the analysis demonstrates how Frostenson's established cultural capital becomes both a resource and a liability. The article identifies three key narrative strategies: discursive reframing, extensive intertextuality that reinforces symbolic capital, and oblique invocations of political persecution. These strategies reveal the tension between Frostenson's prior literary authority and the ethos-building in the works at hand. The Swedish Academy's traditional role as cultural arbiter becomes a site of disruption of Frostenson's authorial ethos.
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