Arts & Culture

What if Bob Dylan won a Nobel and he didn’t care?

Bob CollinsBob Collins Oct 18, 2016
10

There’s no chance winning the Nobel Prize for literature is going to change Bob Dylan.

At his concert the night it was announced he’d won the award that sparked an international debate over whether he deserved it, Dylan sang Frank Sinatra’s Why Try to Change Me Now.

The Guardian reports that Dylan isn’t returning calls from the Swedish Academy.

“Right now we are doing nothing. I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now, that is certainly enough,” the academy’s permanent secretary, Sara Danius, told state radio SR on Monday.

Danius thinks he’ll show up. If he doesn’t, she says it’ll be a nice party anyway.

The debate over Dylan’s selection as the award recipient apparently isn’t letting up in the rarefied air of literature.

Who wouldn’t want to party with this crowd?

The French Moroccan writer Pierre Assouline was even more irate, describing the decision “contemptuous of writers”.

Other authors were more ambivalent. On Monday, Karl Ove Knausgaard told the Guardian: “I’m very divided. I love that the novel committee opens up for other kinds of literature – lyrics and so on. I think that’s brilliant. But knowing that Dylan is the same generation as Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, makes it very difficult for me to accept it. I think one of those three should have had it, really. But if they get it next year, it will be fine.”

Dylan’s songwriting peer and friend Leonard Cohen suggested on Thursday that no prizes were necessary to recognise the greatness of the man who transformed pop music with records like Highway 61 Revisited. “To me,” he said, “[the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”