Nobel Winner's Work is Violent Porn, Says Juror

A member of the Swedish Academy that will award this year's Nobel prize for literature tomorrow has attacked last year's surprise winner, Elfriede Jelinek, dismissing her work as "whingeing, unenjoyable, violent pornography".

The Swedish author Knut Ahnlund said yesterday he was quitting the academy in disgust over the decision to award the 2004 prize to the Austrian novelist. It had "caused irreparable harm to the value of the award for the foreseeable future", he wrote in the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Ahnlund, 82, suggested that only a "tiny number" of the 18 jurors who awarded the prize to the German-speaking Jelinek had actually read any of her books. Jelinek was an "obsessive" with a "single track", Ahnlund added.

It was not clear last night why Ahnlund waited a year before delivering his tirade against Jelinek, who failed to turn up to collect her prize at last year's ceremony. But there was suspicion that the academy member is also unhappy about the latest choice for the 2005 Nobel prize for literature, who will be named tomorrow.

Yesterday Jelinek's German editor dismissed the suggestion that the feminist writer had not deserved the Nobel. "This is absurd. It's crazy," Delf Schmidt told the Guardian. "I don't know why he's waited a whole year to say this. He must want to show dissent over the latest choice of laureate." He added: "Ms Jelinek combines a highly cultivated and literary style with political concerns. She deals with big themes such as Austria's past, and the violence in that past. She was a highly worthy winner."

There has been speculation that the academy was split over whether to hand this year's prize to the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. Other names mentioned have included the Syrian poet Adonis, the American Joyce Carol Oates, and the Swede Thomas Transtromer. The award, worth 10m krona (£735,000), is usually announced on one of the first two Thursdays in October. Unlike the Nobels for peace, medicine, physics, chemistry and economics, the prize date is only announced two days beforehand.

"After this I cannot even formally remain in the Swedish Academy," Ahnlund wrote. Yesterday the academy's permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, said Ahnlund had not participated in academy meetings for nearly 10 years and was not privy to discussions leading to Jelinek's selection. "He knows nothing about the discussion that led to the choice of Elfriede Jelinek so what he says in this article of his must be seen as empty speculation," he said.

The choice of Nobel laureate is often dismissed as obscure when the winner hails from outside the publishing mainstream of Anglophone authors.