Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan: Thoughts from the Readers

So the furore has died down now and we’ve all got over the shock of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature Award. The mainstream media has had its say and the general consensus is that Dylan is a genius (with a few notable exceptions from some outlets).

However, what we care about is what you readers think, after all it’s the general public who buy books, keep the book market buoyant and even to some extent decide the classics of the future, and so we asked our reading addicts in our group what they thought of the whole thing.

Most of you were agreed that Bob Dylan’s lyrics are clever, thought provoking and fantastic, but despite that 63% of you thought that while he is brilliant, he doesn’t create literature. So while you thought that Dylan probably deserves a prize of some kind, you didn’t think that prize should be the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Just 17% of you agreed with the mainstream media, stating that of course Dylan should have won the prize because his lyrics transcend musicality and what he writes should definitely be considered literature.

Those figures together do show at least that Bob Dylan is an icon of our times with 80% of you thinking he’s notable, and fantastic, even if you didn’t believe he should hold the literature prize.

Of the smaller voting sections, 10% of you just don’t get him, or his lyrics and you think he’s absolutely terrible and not worthy of any prize at all. Another 5% answered ‘Bob who?’, and that really speaks for itself. The remaining 4% of votes go to people who just don’t think it’s important either way and that the award is pretty insignificant.

What did come through in our discussion is that many of you are big fans of the artist, but even those people who are big fans, didn’t necessarily think the Nobel Prize was the right award.

There’s no changing the prize, it’s won and done, and if nothing else Dylan will become one of the most notable winners in the history of the prize, just possibly not for the right reasons. We’d love to know what you think too, let us know your thoughts in the comments.