Tom Waits congratulates ‘master’ Bob Dylan on Nobel Prize win

Dylan was awarded the prize for creating 'new poetic expressions'

Tom Waits has sent a congratulatory message to Bob Dylan for winning the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Yesterday (October 13), legendary singer-songwriter Dylan was awarded the coveted prize, credited with having “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

Dylan, 75, becomes the 259th American to have won a Nobel Prize. The award is given to an individual who has produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

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Now a note posted to Waits’ Twitter account from himself and his wife Kathleen Brennan reads: “It’s a great day for Literature and for Bob when a Master of its original form is celebrated. Before epic tales and poems were ever written down, they migrated on the winds of the human voice and no voice is greater than Dylan’s.”

See below.

READ MORE: Bob Dylan’s Poetic Mastery: 10 Of His Finest Lyrics

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Former Isle Of Wight Festival organiser Ray Foulk said that Dylan’s Nobel Prize win was “long overdue”.

The Guardian reports that Sara Danils, Secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Dylan as “a great sampler… and for 54 years he has been at it, reinventing himself.”

On his classic ‘Blonde on Blonde’, she said: “An extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming. putting together refrains, and his brilliant way of thinking.”

“If you look far back, 5000 years, you discover Homer and Sappho. They wrote poetic texts which were meant to be performed, and it’s the same way for Bob Dylan. We still read Homer and Sappho, and we enjoy it.”

Previous winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature include Alice Munro, Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, J M Coetzee, Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney.

Last year’s award was given to Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich.

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