Music legend Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The announcement was made on Thursday morning and award organizers said that the 75-year-old would be receiving the Nobel Prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."
Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941 and released his self-titled debut album in 1962. During his career he won 10 Grammy Awards, one Golden Globe and one Oscar. He received a Pulitzer Prize special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power" in 2008 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, CNN noted.
The singer-songwriter joins Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Britain's Harold Pinter and William Golding, Ireland's Samuel Beckett, Canada's Alice Munro, South Africa's Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chile's Pablo Neruda, France's Jean-Paul Sartre, Germany's Gunter Grass, Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, China's Mo Yan and Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus as recipients of the prestigious award.