The American singer songwriter Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel prize for literature
Full story: Bob Dylan wins Nobel literature prize
10.11pm BST
I’m going to wrap up this blog now. Thanks very much for everyone who’s read it and commented. It’s hard to know which Dylan song to finish on, so I’m going to choose the coruscating Idiot Wind from Blood on the Tracks, eight minutes of some of the most breathtaking musical vitriol ever recorded.
The New Yorker has just published a great piece in which its writers discuss their favourite Dylan lyrics. Rebecca Mead picks this song. She writes:
I’m glad to say that it’s been a while since I felt a personal identification with Idiot Wind, but the furious castigation and the reeling pain conveyed by that song have spoken for me more times than I care to recall. Critics will argue about Dylan’s place in the canon, or about the rightness of bestowing a prize upon a writer whose celebration doesn’t particularly help the publishing industry. But, for my money, anyone who can summon, as a bitter valediction to a lover, the line “I can’t even touch the books you’ve read,” knows—and captures, and incarnates—the power of literature.
10.02pm BST
The legendary music journalist Everett True emails to say he has written some thoughts on Dylan’s award. They include:
Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature says everything about the establishment’s understanding of the appeal of popular music – ie it has none.
Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature heightens the gender and race divide between ‘serious’ rock music and ‘disposable’ pop music. (Think Beck winning at the Grammys.)
9.52pm BST
And here’s a great and somewhat poignant fact from my colleague Bryan Graham.
Dylan is one of five people still living who appear on the Sgt. Pepper's album cover. Dion, Larry Bell, Macca and Ringo are the others.
9.51pm BST
Another interesting piece on why Dylan deserves the Nobel from Rob Salkowitz in Forbes magazine, who makes the argument that over six decades Dylan has channelled the voices of the marginalised. He writes:
One of the primary grievances of the out-groups, whether they are Brexiters, members of the European right, or Trumpians in the US, is that their voices are not heard and respected among the elite. Their concerns about diminished social and economic status, the failure of their communities and families and the general sense of abandonment are treated as collateral damage by elites, who condescend to them without actually understanding the cause of their pain.
Bob Dylan’s art, at its finest, dignifies those voices. He is not of those communities by origin, but he has embraced them so deeply and consistently through his six-decade career that he speaks on their behalf with clarity, conviction and authenticity. At the same time, he is an advocate for social justice at the most basic, human level, and in his mature work refuses to reduce either side of a discussion to caricature.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the March on Washington, 8/28/1963. pic.twitter.com/AgBBzcfmTW
9.42pm BST
Indeed:
My timeline is like watching a "Dylan deserved the Nobel" vs. "Dylan didn't deserve the Nobel" ping pong match.
9.32pm BST
Tonight, Dylan plays in Vegas. His peer and fellow Desert Trip/Oldchella performer Paul McCartney is also playing a concert – at Pappy & Harriet’s, a 300-capacity bar in Pioneertown near the Joshua Tree. The box office opens at 6.30pm. Tickets are $50 which seems pretty good value to get up close and personal with a Beatle.
Our correspondent there says it’s “the biggest thing to happen in Pioneertown since Roy Rogers threw the first bowl at the bowling alley.”
9.16pm BST
Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stones bassist) has written a fine paean of praise to Dylan’s Nobel prize for Vulture, zeroing in on Chimes of Freedom, which he calls “among the greatest pieces of lyric poetry of our time”. He writes:
Poring over the song, the members of the [Nobel] academy would have found the words “for those compelled to drift, or else be kept from drifting.” It might have occurred to them that that Dylan had precisely limned two of the great tragedies of the 20th century — ethnic cleansing and forced exile, on the one hand, and the gulag on the other — in a single prosaic line.
Or how about this: “For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale”; they might have seen at least a hint of recognition of the fights to come in the realm of interracial marriage and, of course, gay rights.
8.49pm BST
The news wire service AFP have been taking the temperature of the literary world’s response to Dylan’s Nobel win, and it’s rather chilly.
“Dylan’s name has often been mentioned over the past few years but we always thought it was a joke,” said the French novelist Pierre Assouline, who could not hide his fury at the Nobel committee.
“Their decision is contemptuous of writers,” he told AFP. “I like Dylan but where is the (literary) work? I think the Swedish Academy have made themselves look ridiculous.”
“I think he’s one of the greatest artists in the world and he’s changed our whole lives with his writing and his poetry.”
And she was scornful of the writers criticising the choice. “I think they’re ridiculous,” she said.
8.35pm BST
Not only is he the songwriter who redefined the pop song and became the voice of a generation, it appears he also made a sculpture which resides in the Clintons’ back garden.
Congrats @bobdylan on a well-deserved Nobel for wise, powerful lyrics that touched minds & hearts. And TY for this amazing orig. sculpture! pic.twitter.com/YdhpIMHiDh
8.27pm BST
Bruce Springsteen (or the people who run his website anyway) has offered his congratulations to Dylan with an excerpt from the Boss’s recently-released autobiography, Born to Run.
Part of it reads:
He inspired me and gave me hope. He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old: “How does it feel... to be on your own?” A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless. Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment.
8.22pm BST
Al Gore has weighed in with his thoughts. It’s safe to say he approves.
Congratulations Bob Dylan! An inspired choice by the Nobel Committee for the Prize in Literature! My favorite writer;still "busy being born"
8.19pm BST
Inspired by Will Self’s comments to the Guardian about whether or not Dylan should accept the Nobel, children’s author Michael Rosen has been moved to pen a verse.
Bob Dylan
hasn't said he's willin',
to take the prize
which @willself says: if he didn't, he'd be wise.
It cheapens Dylan to be associated at all with a prize founded on an explosives and armaments fortune, and more often awarded to a Buggins whose turn it is than a world-class creative artist. Really, it’s a bit like when Sartre was awarded the Nobel – he was primarily a philosopher, and had the nous to refuse it. Hopefully Bob will follow his lead.
8.11pm BST
The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch is seeking to settle the argument via Twitter poll:
it’s been a big mistake to consider the lyrics of influential blind singer-song-writer & lyre player Homer as literature
8.09pm BST
I really enjoyed this piece by Alfred Soto on MTV’s website on why Dylan deserves the Nobel. The whole thing’s great, but here’s a sample paragraph:
There’s no getting around the fact that, say, Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s Field Work works differently than Blonde on Blonde. An ear for assonance and meter as fine as the one that belonged to the 1995 Nobel winner serves a linguistic pleasure that requires the spatial limits of a blank, white, demanding page. So much of the pleasure I get from Dylan, on the other hand, derives from the voice singing those lyrics. He was never more moving than the decade when his larynx turned into a rusted carburetor; he sang like a carping vulture, and I loved it.
7.58pm BST
There are plenty of music writers on Facebook debating Dylan’s win. One of them is our Chicago-based country music writer Mark Guarino, who has given me permission to quote from his post in defence of Dylan’s win, which is being shared a lot. He writes:
7.48pm BST
Rob Delaney’s tweet has also provoked some US arts desk lols:
Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature? What's next, Derek Jeter wins a Tony for his rice pilaf???
7.44pm BST
The creator and star of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has weighed in with an amusingly snarky tweet:
Novelists grousing about Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize: green looks hideous on you. #ThereMustBeSomethingHappeningButYouDontKnowWhatItIs #DoYou
7.23pm BST
The debate about whether or not it was appropriate for Dylan, a songwriter, to win an award for literature, continues. Anna North writes in the New York Times that it wasn’t. She says that when the Nobel is awarded to a musician, “it misses the opportunity to honour a writer”. She adds:
They could have chosen a writer who has made significant innovations in the form, like Jennifer Egan, Teju Cole or Anne Carson. They could have selected a writer from the developing world, which remains woefully underrepresented among Nobel laureates. They could have picked a writer who has built an audience primarily online, like Warsan Shire, who became the first Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014.
7.19pm BST
An affectionate gag from Britain’s David Baddiel.
Apparently Bob Dylan's planning a brilliant acceptance speech. Then, to tour an incomprehensible version of it for twenty years. #Nobel
7.09pm BST
Hello, it’s Alex Needham taking over this blog from New York. Earlier, I “reached out” (as we say in these parts) to Jonathan Franzen for his reaction to Dylan’s Nobel win. The eminent novelist replied:
It’s a bitter disappointment to those of us who hoped that Morrissey would win this year. But it gives us hope for next year.
6.43pm BST
Bob Dylan in his Empire Burlesque phase. Here’s Rolling Stone on his overlooked decade.
Just look at those dark eyes...
6.04pm BST
“We live in a time of great lyricist-songwriters – Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits – but Dylan towers over everyone. His words have been an inspiration to me all my life ever since I first heard a Dylan album at school and I am delighted by his Nobel win. The frontiers of literature keep widening, and it’s exciting that the Nobel Prize recognises that. I intend to spend the day playing Mr Tambourine Man, Love Minus Zero - No Limit, Like a Rolling Stone, Idiot Wind, Jokerman, Tangled Up In Blue and It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.
5.53pm BST
If you’re holding your breath for a reaction from the new laureate, you might have to wait a while. A representative told Associated Press that he had “no immediate comment”.
5.41pm BST
Here’s a handy Spotify sampler for anyone who can’t quite remember which song is which (as if!):
5.40pm BST
The New Yorker’s David Remnick is also in celebratory mood:
What an astonishing and unambiguously wonderful thing! There are novelists who still should win (yes, Mr. Roth, that list begins with you), and there are many others who should have won (Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Auden, Levi, Achebe, Borges, Baldwin . . . where to stop?), but, for all the foibles of the prize and its selection committee, can we just bask for a little while in this one? The wheel turns and sometimes it stops right on the nose.
5.33pm BST
It’s not as if some new work suddenly clinched the deal. Mr. Dylan has been recognized by anyone who cares about words — not to mention music — since the 1960s, when he almost immediately earned an adjective as his own literary and musical school: Dylanesque.
...there’s no question that Mr. Dylan has created a great American songbook of his own: an e pluribus unum of high-flown and down-home, narrative and imagistic, erudite and earthy, romantic and cutting, devout and iconoclastic, finger-pointing and oracular, personal and universal, compassionate and pitiless. His example has taught writers of all sorts — not merely poets and novelists — about strategies of both pinpoint clarity and anyone’s-guess free association, of telegraphic brevity and ambiguous, kaleidoscopic moods.
5.24pm BST
Here’s the great Stephen King making the very good point that, whatever one thinks of Dylan’s literary gifts, this award is going to be a tonic for American morale.
I am ecstatic that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel. A great and good thing in a season of sleaze and sadness.
5.16pm BST
Billy Bragg: “The last couple of stanzas of Mr Tambourine Man opened my eyes and ears to the idea that music and poetry could exist together: “Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind / Down the foggy ruins of time / Far past the frozen leaves / The haunted frightened trees / Out to the windy bench / Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.” I heard them when I was 14 and they opened my mind to the possibility of pop being something more than background music.”
5.09pm BST
And Obama has come good (as we knew he would):
Congratulations to one of my favorite poets, Bob Dylan, on a well-deserved Nobel. https://t.co/c9cnANWPCS
4.46pm BST
Here’s a joke to bring the award back into the literary heartlands. For random rockers who may been lured into this blog by the fame of the recipient, perhaps it’s worth pointing out that The Neapolitan Quartet is the work of a mysterious author who goes by the name of Elena Ferrante …
New theory: @bobdylan won the #NobelPrizeLiterature for The Neapolitan Quartet, but they aren't allowed to tell anybody. @EuropaEditions
4.41pm BST
Related: Are these the lyrics that won Bob Dylan a Nobel prize?
4.27pm BST
The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley believes that “a world that gives Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize is a world that nominates Trump for president”.
Related: Pop lyrics aren't literature? Tell that to Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan
4.05pm BST
We’re all waiting for pronouncements from the US political establishment.
Barack Obama could offer the current presidential contenders some tips, judging by this Rolling Stone article, which quotes him as follows:
“I have probably 30 Dylan songs on my iPod … Maggie’s Farm is one of my favorites during the political season … It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric.”
3.52pm BST
Here’s a transcript of Sara Danius’s Q&A. Could the subtext be that this is Sweden’s way of marking the passing of David Bowie?
Q: Does BD really deserve the prize?
Danius: Of course he does, he just got it. He is a great poet. He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition and he is a wonderful sampler, a very original sampler, he embodies the tradition and for 55, 54 years now he’s been at it and re-inventing himself constantly. Re-inventing himself creating a new identity.
3.46pm BST
Still no word from Bob Dylan himself. According to his website he’s playing Vegas tonight – it’s possible he’s only just waking up. After all, it’s not quite 8am yet.
@richardlea the Nobel committee can't find Dylan to tell him... https://t.co/xQZ8v43Nqz
3.42pm BST
More writers rally behind Dylan – each to his own motive. Could this tweet, from the author of the bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy, be a coded plea for children’s fiction? Note to the Swedish Academy: that would be a popular surprise to spring if you’re looking to break the mould again.
Bob Dylan is a great choice for the Nobel Prize. One result might be to open the prize to genre fiction as well as the 'literary' sort.
3.36pm BST
Related: The poetry of Bob Dylan - from the Guardian archive, April 1965
Predictably he relies often on traditional ballad meters, as the grass roots of oral poetry. Dylan is young, and admits it. He is naive and implies it at stations along his particular line. He is committed; yet what is a poet for these luminous days, when illumination may come from the clash of cobalt and iodine, if not to be committed? The same was said of Pound, Auden and MacNeice; the same is true to day of poets like Christopher Logue, Adrian Mitchell and George MacBeth. The difference is that Dylan is not a readers’ poet: some but by no means all of his verse is able to stand by itself but more commonly it needs musical backing and the strangely dry, bitter quality of his voice to supply the dimension that other poets derive from literal organisation.
3.15pm BST
Joyce Carol Oates puts her voice behind Dylan:
Asked about Nobel for Dylan: inspired & original choice. his haunting music & lyrics have always seemed, in the deepest sense, "literary."
Hmm, as a singer-songwriter he is perhaps unparalleled but in terms of the literary quality of his verse he has at least an equal in the works of Leonard Cohen - Cohen never rhymed house with mouse (as Dylan did in "Hurricane") as far as I'm aware. Given that Cohen is older an nearing the end of the road, it might have been nice to give the prize to him first. And I say that as an absolute Dylan fan.
In terms of form I think the lyric is as worthwhile as any other - Brel would have made a good Nobel laureate
2.52pm BST
Richard Williams plays counsel for the defence:
Related: Why Bob Dylan deserves to win the Nobel prize in literature
2.50pm BST
Let’s not forget the great Dylanologist Mike Marqusee. Here he is reviewing Chronicles, Volume 1, back in 2004:
The prose is a Dylanesque blend of luminous specifics and myopic vagueness. It’s unpruned, sometimes repetitious. There are malapropisms and clichés. But the lapses and rough edges are part of the Dylan package.
Related: Review: Chronicles - Volume One by Bob Dylan
2.44pm BST
Friday 28 August 1964, in a room in the Delmonico hotel at Park Avenue and 59th in New York City: When Dylan met the Beatles.
Priceless:
Here the folk-singing scarecrow-prophet introduced the excitable Scousers to marijuana for (allegedly) the first time. Ringo Starr, the first to be offered a smoke and ignorant of dope etiquette, chugged through that first joint like a stevedore attacking his first Woodbine of the morning and collapsed in a giggling mess. Brian Epstein became so stoned he could only squeak,”I’m so high I’m up on the ceiling.” Paul McCartney believed he’d attained true mental clarity for the first time in his life and instructed Beatles roadie and major-domo Mal Evans to write down everything he said henceforth. Dylan, meanwhile, lost his cool and began answering the hotel phone by shouting, “This is Beatlemania here!” Otherwise they drank wine and acted the goat, like bands do.
Related: When Dylan met the Beatles – history in a handshake?
2.39pm BST
Our own Richard Williams on a high point of musical history for Dylanologists – the 50th anniversary of Subterranean Homesick Blues:
“There’s a pinch of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s Take It Easy in the jumbled images that spilled out almost faster than the ear could process them, nevertheless making perfect sense to its intended audience, who revelled in the truculence of its rapid-fire litany of instructions: “Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parking meters” and “Better stay away from those/That carry around a fire hose.” Most tellingly, the gnomic wisdom of “You don’t need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows” gave a name to a revolutionary student group whose members were, for a while, among America’s most wanted fugitives from justice following a campaign of bombings aimed at banks and government buildings.
Related: Bob Dylan and the Subterranean Homesick Blues revolution
2.29pm BST
The Nobel Prize twitterfeed is in an excitable mood:
Bob Dylan is the first Nobel Laureate since George Bernhard Shaw to have been awarded both a #NobelPrize and an Oscar @TheAcademy
"He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition" https://t.co/g7CnFBlkNB
2.27pm BST
For lovers of found text, here’s an index of opening lines, courtesy of Untold Dylan. The As alone could pass as a piece of poetry, we think:
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
All the early Roman kings in their sharkskin suits bow ties and buttons high top boots
As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden, the wounded flowers were dangling from the vines
At the time of my confession, and the hour of my deepest need
2.19pm BST
Here’s a sample of reader reactions to Dylan’s win:
Related: 'A master of language': readers react to Bob Dylan's Nobel prize in literature
2.14pm BST
Is this what one might call poetic prophecy?
I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face
2.00pm BST
Are we imagining it or is the tide of opinion turning in Dylan’s favour?:
This is awesome: Bob Dylan wins Nobel prize in literature 2016 https://t.co/Dvq580cDEa
1.58pm BST
Here’s some intriguing archaeological evidence of Dylan’s cult status in Sweden:
Related: Scientists sneak Bob Dylan lyrics into articles as part of long-running bet
1.51pm BST
A contributor has pointed out that Rabindranath Tagore was also a songwriter, prompting this exchange:
Wasn't Rabindranath Tagore also a songwriter? So Dylan is not the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Was his prize not for the Gitanjali anthology of poems rather than his songs though? Your point stands though.
1.48pm BST
A fair point from bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult...
I'm happy for Bob Dylan. #ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?
1.41pm BST
And here’s an evocative pictorial record, published to celebrate Dylan’s 70th birthday.
Related: Bob Dylan at 70
1.36pm BST
Salman Rushdie has put himself emphatically among the ranks of the positive:
From Orpheus to Faiz,song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition.Great choice. #Nobel
1.29pm BST
One man who will presumably be delighted by Dylan’s win is Christopher Ricks, who was among the first and foremost to hymn his literary qualities. Ricks must currently be among the most hunted men in the UK, where we believe he is, though he appears to have gone to ground.
Here’s an amusingly sceptical 2003 review of his book Dylan’s Visions of Sin, by the Observer’s Sean O’Hagan, who summed Dylan’s literary credentials up thus:
“Dylan is a singer-songwriter first and foremost. His poetry is contained in the wholeness of his art: the convergence of melody, line, turn of phrase, nuance, drawl, and, famously, electricity. His one book of published prose, the amphetamine-fuelled fragments that make up Tarantula, makes the Beats look disciplined and restrained.
1.16pm BST
Irvine Welsh leaps into the fray, fists flying:
I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.
1.13pm BST
A good point from one of our contributors:
Thought that Dylan always reckoned Smokey Robinson to be America's greatest living poet?
Maybe he should have got the prize?
12.56pm BST
At this early stage. Dylan’s win is creating a fairly deep divide in opinion:
If Bob Dylan can win the Nobel Prize for literature then I think @StephenKing should get elected to the Rock N' Roll hall of fame.
Dylan! Wow! That's a great choice...his voice, his lyrics, his take on the world shaped a generation and beyond.
This feels like the lamest Nobel win since they gave it to Obama for not being Bush
The idea that Dylan is a greater writer (rather than song versifier) than Philip Roth is, frankly, absurd. https://t.co/jLCaBBd3Nf
12.46pm BST
Dylan is the first songwriter to have won the prize, and his regular appearance in the betting odds was regarded as one of the longrunning jokes of the Nobels.
In 2011, a late gamble sent him soaring up the odds to become the fourth favourite, due to what Ladbrokes described as “a substantial gamble from clued-up literary fans”.
12.20pm BST
Bob Dylan is the 259th American to have won a Nobel, across all disciplines, and the first to win the literature prize since Toni Morrison in 1993. He is the ninth American to land the literary laurels since the medals were founded in 1901, putting an end to an apparent hostility among the Swedish academicians towards American literature, which reached its apogee in 2008 with an extraordinary tirade by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury.
He said: “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature … That ignorance is restraining.”
12.13pm BST
Sara Danius, permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, describes Dylan as “A great sampler … and for 54 years he has been at it, reinventing himself.”
Start with Blonde on Blonde, she said... “An extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming. putting together refrains, and his brilliant way of thinking.”
12.01pm BST
Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
11.59am BST
With just a couple of minutes to go, the famous doors remain closed and there’s an excitable buzz in the Nobel forum...
11.51am BST
The Nobel archives are a treasure trove of trivia, with the list of nominees for each year only revealed 50 years on. In 1965, the most recent list of nominations to have been made public, the prize went to Mikhail Sholokhov “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people”.
11.37am BST
The Nobel prize in literature is usually awarded in the same week as the science medals, so this year’s delay has got tongues wagging. Does it reveal a split among the jury?
11.21am BST
Ladbrokes today has Ngugi wa Thiong’o as as favourite at 7/2, with Haruki Murakami tied with the Syrian poet Adonis at 6/1.
Italian scholar Claudio Magris jumped from 33/1 to 12/1 this morning, while Don DeLillo was a surprise entrant into the top 10 earlier in the week.
11.05am BST
Welcome to the final flush of this year’s Nobel season when the sixth and last medal of 2016 will be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction ...” Or that was the intention of the 19th-century industrialist Alfred Nobel, who endowed the award from a fortune made from weapons and explosives. This rubric goes some way to explaining its occasional eccentricity – who today would consider the first recipient, Sully Prudhomme, to be ideally directed?
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