Raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan moved to New York in 1961 and became the defining voice of the 1960s folk revival before controversially 'going electric' in 1965. His lyrics, drawing on Woody Guthrie, the Bible, and Beat poetry, earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the first ever awarded to a songwriter.
Dylan's arrival in Greenwich Village in early 1961 coincided with a folk revival hungry for a voice that could feel both ancient and urgent. Within two years he had written 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'The Times They Are a-Changin',' songs that became anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements almost against his own wishes; Dylan repeatedly resisted being cast as a protest singer or a generational spokesman.
His decision to play electric guitar backed by a rock band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 provoked genuine outrage among folk purists, some accounts describing boos and a famous, possibly apocryphal shout of 'Judas' at a later UK show. Dylan simply kept moving, through country, gospel, and decades of restless reinvention, releasing albums into his eighties.
The Swedish Academy's decision to award him the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature 'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition' provoked its own controversy, with some literary figures objecting that songwriting didn't belong in the same category as novels or poetry collections. Dylan, characteristically, did not attend the ceremony.