When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan last week, it certainly raised some eyebrows.

Some shook their heads in dismay at the idea of the prize going to a popular musician who, unlike Svetlana Alexievich or Tomas Tranströmer, probably wouldn’t benefit much from the increased attention the Nobel provides.

“Part of the problem, of course, is that Bob Dylan is a musician,” writes Hanson O’Haver in Vice. Given that music occupies a larger role in popular culture than literature, the Nobel, O’Haver says, is “at least a chance to remind the larger public that serious literature exists.”

But others are saying that Dylan is the “perfect choice,” given that Dylan has received support from writers all over the world. “For literature to do anything at all,” Jennifer Croft writes in another op-ed for Vice, “it must reach readers and listeners; Bob Dylan is a wonderful example of doing just this.”

In addition to popular attention, Dylan has been the subject of literary and even legal scholarship for decades, beginning in the late 1960s. The first book on Dylan, published in the late 1970s, is by Betsy Bowden and titled Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan (Indiana University Press). (Reportedly, more than 1,000 books in English on Dylan have been published, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that book sales of Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume 1, and his compilation of lyrics, The Lyrics: 1961-2012, have skyrocketed since the Nobel announcement.

Dylan, throughout it all has been conspicuously silent: he has not responded to any of the Nobel committee’s emails or phone calls, according to the committee’s Permanent Secretary Sarah Danius, and it’s thus unclear whether he will show up to the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm.

Related reading: Writers respond to Dylan’s Nobel win on Twitter, and Malcolm Jones explores the United States’ contentious relationship with the Nobel Prize committee in The Daily Beast.

Illustration Credit: N. Elmehed. © Nobel Media 2016