The times they are a-changin’! Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The announcement was made today by the Swedish Academy.
Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius said Dylan was awarded the Nobel for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
In an interview straight after the announcement, Danius was asked by an incredulous journalist: “Does Bob Dylan really deserve the Nobel Prize? Why?”
“Why?” she responded. “Well of course he does, he just got it.”
She continued: “He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition. He is a wonderful sampler, a very original sampler. He embodies the tradition, and for 54 years now he’s been at it, reinventing himself constantly, creating a new identity.
“If you want to start listening or reading you may start with Blonde on Blonde, the album from 1966. You’ve got many classics, and it’s an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming and putting together refrains, and his pictorial thinking.”
When asked whether the Academy had widened the horizon of the prize, Danius said she didn’t believe so.
“It may look that way but really we haven’t. If you look back, far back, 2 500 years or so, you discover Homer and Sappho. They wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, that were meant to be performed, often together with instruments. It’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho, and we enjoy it, and the same thing with Bob Dylan. He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition.”
Danius was asked whether she thought there would be criticism in the wake of the announcement, and replied: “I hope not.”
Finally, she was asked whether she had listened to a lot of Dylan personally growing up.
“Not really, but he was always around so I know the music and I’ve started to appreciate him much more now than I did,” she said. “I was a David Bowie fan. Perhaps it’s a question of generation, I don’t know. Today I’m a lover of Bob Dylan.”
It appears the Academy had Dylan’s lyrics in mind when deciding the prize, but he has also written two books: Tarantula, a collection of prose and poetry published in 1971, and Chronicles: Volume One, the first part of a planned three-volume memoir, published in 2004.
Watch the announcement here:
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Book details
- Tarantula by Bob Dylan
EAN: 9780007215041
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- Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
EAN: 9781849833370
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