Nobel laureate Bob Dylan on Saturday sent a message thanking the Swedish academy for awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor the US singer and songwriter believed was about as likely as “standing on the moon.”
“I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize,” Dylan said in a speech read by US Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji at the Nobel banquet.
“If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon,” he was quoted as saying.
Photo: AFP
The media-shy Dylan finally accepted the 8 million kronor (US$870,166) prize for literature, after frustrating the award-giving academy with weeks of silence following the announcement of the award on Oct. 13.
His absence has been widely debated in Sweden in recent weeks, where the Nobel prize is a huge source of pride.
In his place singer Patti Smith performed Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall at the award ceremony earlier in the day. A nervous Smith forgot the lyrics and had to start over, but still received emphatic applause at the end.
While Dylan was absent, all other laureates, including Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and Britain’s Duncan Haldane, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, accepted a medal and a diploma from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf before attending the banquet at Stockholm’s City Hall for about 1,300 people.
In a Nordic country priding itself on its modernity, the Nobel banquet is vestige of old-world luxury that every year brings together royalty and the powerful in politics and business with some of the world’s top scientific minds.
The prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and economic science are awarded in Stockholm, while the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway.
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