US singer Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The 75-year-old rock legend received the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
The balladeer, artist and occasional actor is the first songwriter to win the prestigious award.
The performer - who took his stage name from the poet Dylan Thomas - is the first American to win the award since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993.
Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Nobel Foundation, said Dylan had been chosen because he was "a great poet in the English speaking tradition".
"For 54 years now he's been at it reinventing himself, constantly creating a new identity," she told reporters in Stockholm.
Dylan had long been tipped as a potential prize recipient, but few experts expected the Swedish Academy to extend the award to a genre such as folk rock music.
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