STOCKHOLM (AP) — Five days after Bob Dylan was named the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, no one knows how he feels about the prestigious award — not even the Nobel judges.
The Swedish Academy, which bestows the annual honor, says it hasn’t been able to reach Dylan since the award was announced last Thursday.
Permanent Secretary Sara Danius told Swedish Radio she’s been in contact with a close associate of Dylan, but not the laureate himself.
“I am not worried at all. I have a feeling that he will get in touch,” she said.
Danius said the academy isn’t making further efforts to reach him, but hopes he will accept the invitation to collect his award at the annual Nobel ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
“If he doesn’t want to come then he doesn’t want to come,” she said. “It will be a big and nice party anyway.”
Only two people have declined a Nobel Prize in literature. Boris Pasternak did so under pressure from Soviet authorities in 1958 and Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined all official honors, turned it down in 1964.
Dylan, who is currently on tour in the U.S., hasn’t mentioned the Nobel Prize during his concerts since the announcement.
As of Tuesday, his official webpage made no mention of the prize except in the “books” section, where a post dated Oct. 17 about his lyrics collection “The Lyrics: 1961-2012” noted in all caps that he was a Nobel Prize winner.
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I had to laugh. Still Bob Dylan, thank God. I have only one criticism of Dylan: he should not have met Obama at the White House to receive whatever award Obama gave him there. The old Dylan of yesteryear would not have met Obama at the White House. I liked that version of him better, back when "The Times really were a-Changin’ ". I think it is instructive to remember that the cowardly war criminal obama did accept the award happily. Were Obama to have any personal integrity, he would not have accepted the Peace Prize, knowing it was undeserved, a joke on him and the world, as he has amply demonstrated in his 8 years of worldwide torture and terrorism.