US singer Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first songwriter to win the prestigious award. The 75-year-old rock legend received the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

• The balladeer, artist and actor is the first American to win since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993. President Obama said the honour was “well-deserved”. Bob Dylan – the first person to win a Nobel Prize the same day as he plays a gig in Las Vegas.
• For more than six decades he has remained a mythical force in music, his gravelly voice and poetic lyrics musing over war, heartbreak, betrayal, death and moral faithlessness in songs that brought beauty to life’s greatest tragedies.
• Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, Dylan got his first guitar at the age of 14 and performed in rock’n’roll bands in high school. He adopted the name Dylan, after the poet Dylan Thomas, and, drawn to the music of Woody Guthrie, began to perform folk music.
• His triumph follows comments in 2008 from Horace Engdahl, the then permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, that “the US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.
• Dylan had been mentioned in the Nobel speculation for years, but few experts expected the academy to extend the prestigious award to a genre such as pop music.