Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bob Dylan was announced as the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.

And Bob Dylan is a plagiarist.

The Swedish Academy, which votes on the prize, can make their reasons and rationales. They can call Dylan a "great poet in the English-speaking tradition," and suggest Dylan "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

But Dylan isn't a poet. He's a cult of personality, a creation solely conjured up to captivate the gullible, and a plagiarist who has repeatedly stolen lines and passages from obscure writers and passed it off as his own work.

There was the story in 2003 of Dylan being accused of stealing passages from Japanese writer Junichi Saga's novel Confessions of a Yakuza.

There were allusions in 2006 of Dylan using words, phrasing, and imagery of the relatively obscure American Civil War poet Henry Timrod.

In 2009, people noticed that Dylan's 2004 memoir seemed to borrow heavily from vintage editions of Time Magazine.

There were even questions in 2011 if Dylan's original artwork in a show wasn't actually just direct copies of historical photographs.

There have been other accusations as well--and not all believe Dylan is the stunningly skilled writer the Swedish Academy and his cult of followers believe him to be. His contemporary, Joni Mitchell, has repeatedly called Dylan out. In a 2010 interview, Mitchell let loose. "Bob is not authentic at all," she said. "He's a plagiarist and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception." In a 2013 interview with Uncut, Mitchell continued the feeling. When asked about calling Dylan a plagiarist, Mitchell said, "It's not like I outed him. He stole all of his lines out of a Japanese hoodlum's novel. There was a lawsuit impending, but it got dropped. He told me 'I haven't written a song in years.'"

There's the old, overused adage that good writers borrow; great writers steal, and by that very vague qualifier Dylan is worthy of the Nobel Prize.

By any other metric, by any other definition, by any sense of ethics, Dylan has succeeded only by piggybacking off the backs of people who spent many long days and longer nights trying to craft a beautiful line of poetry, a phrase that instills awe, a piece of art. Dylan is not an artist, he is not a writer, and he is not original.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature doesn't belong to Bob Dylan, although he may claim it. The award belongs to obscure Civil War poets, and Japanese storytellers, and the long deceased writers of Time Magazine of years gone by.