Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize win redefined the boundaries of literature. On his 81st birthday, on 24th May, let’s us look back to the decade’s most sensational literary event!

Robert Zimmerman named himself Dylan after the famous Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas. Confounding folk purists with his electric guitar, he sold millions of records for decades. 

On 13 October 2016, The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan “ for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” 

While a few questioned the radical choice of the Swedish Academy, Salman Rushdie applauded the Academy’s choice and called Bob Dylan, “ the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition.” 

The misguided decision of the Academy was further questioned by the novelist Rabih  Alameddine, a Lebanese-American pa inert and writer whose 2021 novel, ‘ The Wrong End of the Telescope’ won the 2022 PEN/ FAULKNER Award for Fiction. He compared Dylan’s win to be as silly as Winston Churchill. 

Whether or not he was the appropriate choice for the Nobel, Dylan was also left ‘speechless’ and wondered how his songs were related to literature.Though an unusual win, he is studied by Oxford scholars and loved by people from all walks of life. 

Dylan has peppered literary allusions into his music and has referenced Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Ezra Pound. He has also published poetry and prose, including his 1971 collection, ‘ Tarantula’ and ‘ Chronicles: Volume One’, a memoir published in 2004. 

Though Dylan’s lyrics are pitted against poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry included his song ‘ Desolation Row’ in its 2006 edition, and Cambridge University Press released ‘ The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan’ in 2009. 

The literary stylist in his lifetime filled the gap between high art and commercial art. Dylan is not the first to be the Academy’s obscure choice. In 1953, Winston Churchill received the prize for ‘ brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values’. Another surprising example is Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexivich whose reportage drew from oral history. 

The award has elevated Dylan to the literary benchmark set by fellow Nobel laureates like Eliot, Morrison, Marquez, Beckett, and such others. Sara Danius called Dylan ‘ a great poet in the English-speaking tradition’ and compared him to Homer and Sappho, whose work were in the oral tradition. 

The icon’s many honours include Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe Awards. He won the special Pulitzer Prize in 2008. Former President Obama during the ceremony said, ‘ he is still chasing that sound…for a little bit of truth.’