As you may have heard, a surprising announcement was made by The Swedish Academy about the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. He has been at it for more than 50 years and he’s the first musician who was awarded with such an honor.
To quote the Academy: ,,Dylan deserved the honor for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.“ He was also called „a great poet in the English-speaking tradition“ and „a wonderful sampler, a very original sampler“. Actually, this wasn’t the first time Bob was nominated so the chance of him winning wasn’t new. However, the news did come as a shock to the public.
Of course there was debate about whether the award was to be given to a musician and if Dylan deserved it, but Alfred Nobel’s original description of the prize brought an open-minded view of what qualified as literature. According to the Nobel Prize’s website, he specified that the award could be given to any “writings which, by virtue of their form and style, possess literary value.”
As for me, I would say the times they are a-changin’.
Napisao: Marko Duvnjak