First songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan (USA, b. Robert Zimmerman) for creating "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" during a recording career spanning almost 55 years. The singer-songwriter, 75, who built his long and illustrious career on songs like "Blowin' in the Wind", "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Like a Rolling Stone", is the first songwriter to receive the Literature prize, which was first awarded in 1901.

Dylan's name was announced – to cheers and applause (and a great deal of surprise) – by Prof Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, on 13 October 2016. Speaking after the announcement, Prof Danius said: "He [Dylan] 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 54 years now he has been... reinventing himself constantly... creating a new identity." Prof Danius cited the "many classics" on Dylan's 1966 album Blonde on Blonde as an "extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming and putting together refrains, and his pictorial thinking".

The BBC said his songs were a "mixture of political questioning, religious exploration and interest in humanity".

Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature include Rudyard Kipling (1907), George Bernard Shaw (1925), T S Eliot (1948), Sir Winston Churchill (1953), Ernest Hemingway (1954), Harold Pinter (2005) and Svetlana Alexievich (2015).

Dylan's other honours include 12 Grammy Awards (1973–2016), an Academy Award (2000), induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1982), and awards for the National Medal of Arts (2009) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012).

The Nobel Prize was named after the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel (1833–96) and was first established in 1895. The international prizes are awarded annually in Chemistry, Literature, Peace, Physics and Physiology or Medicine.