AMAZING! HERE IS THE 2016 NOBEL LAUREATE
The Swedish Academy has decided
to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan “for having created new
poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Recall that Prof. Wole Soyinka won this prize in 1986 and was regarded as the first African to win the prize since its inception in 1901. Bob Dylan, 75, has been announced
as the new Nobel Laureate, 2016.
Read his biography culled from
Nobel Prize Facebook Page.
Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth,
Minnesota. He grew up in a Jewish middle-class family in the city of Hibbing.
As a teenager he played in various bands and with time his interest in music
deepened, with a particular passion for American folk music and blues. One of
his idols was the folk singer Woody Guthrie. He was also influenced by the
early authors of the Beat Generation, as well as by modernist poets.
Dylan moved to New York in 1961
and began to perform in clubs and cafés in Greenwich Village. He met the record
producer John Hammond with whom he signed a contract for his debut album,
called Bob Dylan (1962). In the following years he recorded a number of albums
which have had a tremendous impact on popular music: Bringing It All Back Home
and High-way 61 Revisited in 1965, Blonde On Blonde in 1966 and Blood On The
Tracks in 1975. His productivity continued in the following decades, resulting
in masterpieces like Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out Of Mind (1997) and Modern Times
(2006).
Dylan’s tours in 1965 and 1966
attracted a lot of attention. For a period he was accompa-nied by film maker D.
A. Pennebaker, who documented life around the stage in what would come to be
the movie Dont Look Back (1967). Dylan has recorded a large number of albums
revolving around topics like the social conditions of man, religion, politics
and love. The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions, under
the title Lyrics. As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active
as painter, actor and scriptwriter.
Besides his large production of
albums, Dylan has published experimental work like Taran-tula (1971) and the
collection Writings and Drawings (1973). He has written the autobiog-raphy
Chronicles (2004), which depicts memories from the early years in New York and
which provides glimpses of his life at the center of popular culture. Since the
late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured persistently, an undertaking called the
“Never-Ending Tour”. Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on
contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of
secondary literature.
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