Bob Dylan delivers Nobel Prize lecture days before deadline
Singer-songwriter had until 10 June before being required to give back the $900,000 prize money
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Your support makes all the difference.Bob Dylan has finally delivered the lecture required to keep the $900,000 Nobel Prize money, eight months after he became the first musician to win the award.
The US singer-songwriter's ambivalence to one of the world's most prestigious honours saw him branded "impolite and arrogant" after his apparent indifference to an honour that can transform the career of lesser-known writers.
The 'Like A Rolling Stone' singer took made no public statement after his win was announced in October, and a brief reference added to his website was quickly removed after the media caught wind of it.
Some in the literary world criticised the decision to give it to the musician and the dissent grew louder as Dylan silence continued.
It led one academy member, Per Wastberg, to call Dylan “impolite and arrogant".
But at the end of March he finally received his award at a private event.
He has now released a taped lecture, just days before the deadline of 10 June, at which point he would have had to forfeit the cash.
In his speech, posted on the Nobel website, he cited his influences, including Buddy Holly.
“If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I'd have to start with Buddy Holly... He was the archetype. Everything I wasn't and wanted to be.”
He "was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence", Dylan added.
"Out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn't know what. And it gave me the chills.
"It was a day or two after that that his plane went down… somebody handed me a Leadbelly record with the song Cottonfields on it. And that record changed my life right then and there."
He also mentioned three books which had an impact on his career: Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Homer's The Odyssey and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.
But at the end of the lecture, Dylan had a simple message.
"If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means."
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