American singer songwriter Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

He received the award “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, according to the Nobel committee.

In a career spanning five decades, he has won nine Grammy awards and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

His protest songs Blowin' in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin became anthems of 1960s counter-culture.

Dylan's landmark albums included Highway 61 Revisted, Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks.

A musical pioneer, he was one of the first rock stars to write songs about politics, social justice, and drug-use.

In 2000 he won an Academy Award for his song, Things Have Changed, which featured on the soundtrack of the film Wonder Boys.

Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman to Jewish parents in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1941.

Both sets of his grandparents were immigrants from eastern Europe.

His mother was the president of the local branch of Hadassah, the women's Zionist group, while his father, a salesman, was a B’nai B’rith president.

As a teenager in the 1950s, he attended a Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin - the same camp he sent his own children to years later.

Dylan made several trips to Israel in the late-1960s and ’70s, during one visit, he is said to have begun plans for moving his family to a kibbutz.

He has played several concerts in Israel, most recently in June this year, when he ignored pressure from the BDS movement not to perform.

In the 1970s he announced he was a born-again Christian. He later stepped back from Christianity, and embraced his Jewish roots in the 1980s.