Bob Dylan recently became the first songwriter to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.

The award, previously given to writers such as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, and William Faulkner, is given by the Nobel Committee each year.

This year, however, the award was presented, on October 13, to Dylan, the 75-year-old songwriter known for songs such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” Desolation Row,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and “The Times they are a Changin’.”

The awarding committee gave Dylan the award for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

The presentation generated controversy, as many disagree with giving the Nobel Prize to a musician. Others believe the choice is perfectly justified given Dylan’s immense catalogue of poetic lyrics.

Many of Dylan’s fellow songwriters congratulated him on his award, including Leonard Cohen. To Cohen, giving Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize “is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest.” Iconic singer Tom Waits posted a rare message to his Twitter feed reading: “It’s a great day for Literature and for Bob when a Master of its original form is celebrated. Before epic tales and poems were ever written down, they migrated on the winds of the human voice and no voice is greater than Dylan’s.”

Bob Dylan himself has not so much as acknowledged the award. The only mention of it on his website was deleted after a week, and he has not returned emails from the Nobel Prize committee. Whether this is to keep his image as the everyman or simply because he doesn’t care can only be speculated on, but in an article written by the Associated Press, Swedish writer Per Wastberg, a member of the Nobel academy, called Dylan’s radio silence on the issue “impolite and arrogant.”