Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, organizers announced early Thursday — marking the first time the prestigious award has gone to someone known primarily as a musician.
The Swedish Academy cited the 75-year-old music icon for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Dylan – who took his stage name from the poet Dylan Thomas – had been mentioned in the Nobel speculation for years, but few expected the academy to extend the award to a pop songwriter and musician.
Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, likened Dylan’s work and his literary merits to those of the earliest Western poets.
Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941 and began his musical career in 1959, playing in coffee houses in Minnesota. Much of his best-known work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal historian of America’s troubles. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘The Times They are A-Changin” were among anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. Since the late 1980s he has toured persistently, an undertaking he has dubbed the “Never-Ending Tour”.
He is the first American to win since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993.
