A 75 year old Swedish songwriter and singer, Bob Dylan, has won a Nobel Prize in literature from the Swedish Nobel prize Academy for the year 2016.
The award, described as the first in history of the Swedish Academy for a songwriter and singer has been accorded great honor.
The New York Times confirmed that Dylan is the first American to win the prize since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993. The announcement of the award in Stockholm was a surprise.
Although Dylan has been mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, his work does not fit into the literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize has traditionally recognized.
Dylan was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minn., and grew up in Hibbing. He played in bands as a teenager, influenced by the folk musician Woody Guthrie, the authors of the Beat Generation and modernist poets.
Dylan, whose original name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, identifies as Christian and has released several albums of religiously inspired songs, but he was born into a Jewish family. [myad]
