By Prisca Sam-Duru, with agency reports

US singer and songwriter, Bob Dylan, yesterday emerged winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature.

Dylan, 75, originally known as Robert Allen Zimmerman, the first American winner in 23 years, received the award for having “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, according to the Swedish Academy.

He is the first American to win the prize since the novelist, Toni Morrison, in 1993. Although Mr. Dylan has been mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, the announcement in Stockholm was a surprise because his work, according to some critics, does not fit into the literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize had traditionally recognized.

Sara Danius, a literary scholar and the Permanent Secretary of the 18-member Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, called Mr. Dylan “a great poet in the English-speaking tradition” and compared him to Homer and Sappho, whose work was delivered orally.

Asked if the decision to award the prize to a musician signaled a broadening in the definition of literature, Ms. Danius jokingly responded: “The times are changing, perhaps,” referencing one of Mr. Dylan’s songs.