He said he wanted to teach a course on Bob Dylan.
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“Bob Dylan is one of the greatest poets of all time”, said award-winning, Montreal-based author Kathleen Winter, citing Dylan’s 1963 track “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” among her favourites. It added that the Nobel decision certainly “must not have pleased real writers, such as potential winners Don DeLillo, Philip Roth or Haruki Murakami, who know the enormous work that goes into writing a novel”.
Sara Danius is from the Swedish Academy.
And US president Barack Obama also tweeted his congratulations to Dylan, who he describes as one of his favourite poets.
Irvine Welsh, the Scottish author, wrote on Twitter: “If you’re a “music” fan, look it up in the dictionary”.
Reactions to the choice of Dylan were mostly positive, though some disapproved. He is the most influential songwriter of his time, who brought a new depth, range and complexity to rock lyrics and freed Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell and countless other artists to break out from the once-narrow boundaries of love and dance songs. “Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition”, he tweeted.
Oates too, a fervent social media user, implied she had not been waiting with bated breath for a call from Oslo. Canadian writer Alice Munro was awarded in 2013 for her short stories.
Dylan was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in Hibbing.
DYLAN: (Singing) You’re invisible now you’ve got no secrets to hide.
The Nobel Prize ceremonies take place in Stockholm where each laureate receives a gold medal, a diploma and a sum of money that has been decided by the Nobel Foundation.
Must it still be confined to poetry and fiction given that last year’s Nobel victor was a journalist, Svetlana Alexievich?
But University of OR assistant professor of music theory Drew Nobile said Dylan wouldn’t consider himself a poet.
For the acclaimed Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, literature’s frontiers can be more elastic.
“The Academy has spoken to Dylan’s agent and his tour manager”, the Academy’s chancellor Odd Zschiedrich told AFP.
University of Chicago music professor Steven Rings says the move is set to challenge people’s ideas of what constitutes literature.
“I can remember seeing him on 60 Minutes probably 25 years ago and Ed Bradley said ‘Well, why don’t you do that?’ He said ‘Well, you do it Ed, if you think it’s so easy to write those lines”.
Dylan, whose songs include Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power”.
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In other words, feel bad for Homer and Sappho that the Greeks didn’t have recording studios, but don’t discredit Dylan because he did. And naturally he was inspired by the poets of the Beat Generation.
