When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize

Welcome to Douglas Murray’s Things Worth Remembering column, where he highlights great speeches from famous speakers that we should take to heart. Scroll down to listen to Douglas discuss Bob Dylan’s 2017 Nobel Lecture.

A Nobel Prize is not an honor given for free. Whenever the Nobel committees hold their annual conference call – as they did this week – there will be those who pick up the phone, unaware that they will be giving a public lecture in their chosen language to confirm their status as laureates Must hold field or lose the $900,000 prize.

Perhaps we should feel sorry for the recipients who, while rewarded for benefiting humanity, are unable to communicate their thoughts to the rest of their species. The Peace Prize winner is usually inspiring, of course, but the scientists are often a godsend. (To illustrate this point, I would like to introduce the title of the lecture given by one of last year’s Nobel laureates in chemistry: “Spatial confinement of electronic and vibronic excitations in QDs.”) But when Alfred Nobel explained his idea for the awards in his 1895 When he read out his will, he first honored a specific art form: literature. Surely the wordsmiths are best suited to accomplish this task?

Unfortunately, writers are often not speakers. Last year’s literary prize winner, Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, spoke about how his life as a writer grew out of his own fear of speaking out loud – a fear that is palpable in the recording of the speech. The year before, French memoirist Annie Ernaux kept her eyes on the page as she gave a passable speech about finding the right words. Nevertheless, a literary prize winner remains in memory – and not just because his award was rather controversial at the time.

On this very day, eight years ago, Bob Dylan received a phone call that left him “speechless.”