Bob Dylan or Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941. The balladeer, artist and actor took his stage name from the poet Dylan Thomas – had long been tipped as a potential prize recipient.
Sara Danius, 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.
President Obama said the honour was “well-deserved”. “Congratulations to one of my favourite poets,” he wrote on Twitter.
A few hours after the announcement the singer performed at the Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas where he didn’t mention anything about his prize.
Not everyone welcomed the Academy’s decision, though. Lebanese novelist Rabih Alameddine tweeted that “Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars,” adding: “This is almost as silly as Winston Churchill,” referring to the literature award given to Britain’s wartime prime minister in 1953. “Basically, If I wanted to give a Nobel Prize in Literature to a poet, I’d give it to a poet,” Alameddine added later. “And I do think Dylan is a wonderful songwriter.”
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