Nobel Literature Prize 2016: Everything you want to know about music icon Bob Dylan

Getty Images

New Delhi: Us music icon Bob Dylan stunned the entire world on Thursday as he bagged the Nobel Literature Prize 2016. You will be amazed to know that the 75-year-old legend has now become the first songwriter to win the prestigious honour.

Bob was awarded 'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. With this, he also takes home the eight million kronor ($906,000 or 822,000 euros) prize sum.

Here are some major highlights from Bob Dylan's journey:  

The Nobel is the latest accolade for a singer who has come a long way from his humble beginnings as Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, who taught himself to play the harmonica, guitar and piano.

Captivated by the music of folksinger Woody Guthrie, Zimmerman changed his name to Bob Dylan -- reportedly after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas -- and began performing in local nightclubs.

After dropping out of college he moved to New York in 1960. His first album contained only two original songs, but the 1963 breakthrough "The Freewheelin` Bob Dylan" featured a slew of his own work including the classic "Blowin` in the Wind."Armed with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar, Dylan confronted social injustice, war and racism, quickly becoming a prominent civil rights campaigner -- and recording an astonishing 300 songs in his first three years.

In 1965 Dylan`s first British tour was captured in the classic documentary "Don`t Look Back" -- the same year he outraged his folk fans by using an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival on Rhode Island.

The following albums, "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde," won rave reviews, but Dylan`s career was interrupted in 1966 when he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, and his recording output slowed in the 1970s.

By the early 1980s his music was reflecting the performer`s born-again Christianity, although this was tempered in successive albums, with many fans seeing a resurgence of his explosive early-career talent in the 1990s.

Since the turn of millennium, as well as his regular recording output and touring, Dylan has also found time to host a regular radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, and published a well-received book "Chronicles," in 2004.

He was the focus of at least two more films, Martin Scorsese`s 2005 "No Direction Home" and "I`m not There" in 2007 starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett.

Over the years Dylan has won 11 Grammy awards, as well as one Golden Globe and even an Oscar in 2001, for best original song "Things have Changed" in the movie "Wonder Boys."

(With AFP inputs)