By Aaron Millier-
The 75-year-old music writer Bob Dylan was awarded the prize for “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Nobel prize
The first songwriter to win the prestigious award, he is the first American to win the award since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993.
Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Dylan had been chosen because he was “a great poet in the English-speaking tradition”.
“For 54 years now he’s been at it reinventing himself, constantly creating a new identity,” she told reporters in Stockholm.
Dylan had long been tipped as a potential prize recipient, but few experts expected the academy to extend the award to a genre such as folk rock music.
POETIC SONGWRITER
Dylan’s career began in 1959, playing in coffee houses in Minnesota. His songs chronicled social unrest and became and became representative of American civil rights. with songs like blowin’ in the wind. Performing with guitar , keyboards and harmonica, he sings with a changing line of musicians and continually tours in what many now refer as -the never-ending tours’. His name has long been listed among potential Nobel prize winners for the future, though many cynics considered it a joke- a joke that is now serious.
AWARDS
Dylan has sold over 100 million records and won numerous awards including the Grammy Awards, a golden globe award, and an academy award. Inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame, the Minnesota hall of fame, and the Nashville songwriter hall of fame, he received the Pulitzer prize in July 2008, in which he was awarded a special citation for his influence on popular music and American culture marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power
The coveted award will be presented alongside this year’s other five Nobel Prizes on the 10 December. Well done Dylan! You are a treasure to Americans and all of the humanity in reality.