Turns out you don’t have to write any books to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Singer Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The 75-year-old rock legend received the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Dylan 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. Songs like Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They are A-Changin’ became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements.
The Nobel, one of the world’s most prestigious and financially generous awards, comes with a prize of 8 million Swedish kronor, or just over $900,000. The literature prize is given for a lifetime of writing rather than for a single work.
Other contenders in the race his year were Philip Rothand Don DeLillo, and the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.