Gustav III modeled his Academy on the Academie Francaise, drafting its statutes largely himself. The new body would cultivate Swedish letters at a time when French dominated European culture. Members would serve for life, occupying numbered chairs that pass to successors only upon death. The Academy would meet in the old Stock Exchange building on Stortorget in Gamla Stan, and each December 20th - the birthday of the warrior king Gustavus Adolphus - would hold its Annual Grand Ceremony. The motto 'Talent and Taste' expressed Gustav's vision: literary excellence paired with refined aesthetic judgment. Each year would see a commemorative medal struck honoring a prominent Swede. Within six years, Gustav was dead from an assassin's bullet at a masked ball, but his Academy endured.

The Academy's linguistic mission produced three towering works. The Svenska Akademiens ordlista, a spelling dictionary, reached its fourteenth edition. More ambitious is the Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, a historical dictionary begun in 1893 and completed in 2023 after 130 years of scholarship - thirty-eight volumes mapping the evolution of Swedish words with the exhaustive approach of the Oxford English Dictionary. A third dictionary covers modern Swedish with pronunciations and etymologies. Beyond dictionaries, the Academy published a four-volume grammar for scholars and a single-volume companion for general readers. All three dictionaries now live free online at svenska.se, democratizing access to centuries of lexicographic labor.

Alfred Nobel's will, read in 1896, charged the Academy with selecting the Nobel Prize in Literature - a task not in its original remit. After initial hesitation, the eighteen members accepted. Since 1901, they have gathered each autumn to debate which author among all living writers has produced 'the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.' The laureate receives a medal, a diploma, and as of 2024, eleven million Swedish crowns. The ceremony unfolds on December 10th, the anniversary of Nobel's death. Selma Lagerlof became the first woman to win in 1909. The Academy has honored poets and novelists, playwrights and essayists, from Rabindranath Tagore to Toni Morrison. Beyond the Nobel, the Academy awards nearly fifty prizes annually, including the Dobloug Prize for Swedish and Norwegian fiction and the Nordic Prize, its largest award after the Nobel itself.

The Academy has weathered storms. In 1795, just three years after Gustav's assassination, political turmoil suspended operations for two years. In 1989, two members resigned over the Academy's response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. But nothing shook the institution like the 2017-2018 scandal involving sexual misconduct allegations against a figure connected to Academy members. For the first time in over seventy years, no Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 2018. Members resigned; the Academy's credibility fractured. King Carl XVI Gustaf, who by tradition attends the Annual Grand Ceremony, spoke of evaluating reforms, including allowing members to resign from their lifelong positions. By 2019, after structural changes to the Nobel Committee, the prize resumed - awarding two laureates that year to clear the backlog.

The Academy meets in the Borshuset, the former Stock Exchange building facing Stortorget, the oldest square in Stockholm's old town. Inside, the Great Hall hosts the December ceremonies where new members deliver their inaugural addresses and the autumn sessions where Nobel deliberations occur. Each of the eighteen chairs bears a number, and occupants trace their lineage back through every predecessor who held that seat. The current roster includes poets, novelists, linguists, and literary scholars - the intellectual heirs of those first thirteen members Gustav appointed in 1786. They carry forward a mandate now spanning two and a half centuries: preserving Swedish, honoring literary achievement, and deciding which writer among billions of words will receive the call that changes everything.