On Thursday, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan was announced as a winner of the Nobel Literature Prize. 

It came as a shock to many people but the singer is praised for the poetic flow of his works. However, the 75-year-old is not the only one whose songs possess poetic power.

Here are four other singers with lyrics laced with quality poetry.

Leonard Cohen

The Canadian bard who influenced a whole generation of songwriters with such melancholic ballads as “Suzanne” and “So Long Marianne” has already won Spain’s prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for literature.

He began as a poet and novelist, only moving into songwriting and performing in the mid-1960s.

His last collection of poems, “Book of Longing”, was published to great acclaim in 2006 and later set to music by American composer Philip Glass.

The 82-year-old, who told the New Yorker magazine this week that he was “ready to die — I hope its not too uncomfortable”, will release his 14th album “You Want It Darker” October 21.

Cohen memorably described the writing process as “like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.”

Patti Smith

The US rock singer and writer is something of a Renaissance woman, equally revered for her poetry and photography as for her music.

Her memoir “Just Kids”, which centres on her intense friendship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the avant garde New York of the early 1970s, was an international bestseller and won her the National Book Award in 2010.

Often seen as the godmother of American punk, the singer of “Horses” is a lifelong fan of the rebellious French poet Arthur Rimbaud. She also befriended the surviving Beat Generation of American writers and poets including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

A big Dylan fan herself, she toured with him in 1995 a year after the death of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith.

Nick Cave

The Australian composer and singer is often seen as a modern Rimbaud, marked by his obsessions with love, death, religion and violence.

The gothic frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is often called rock’s “Prince of Darkness” for the unsparing emotional intensity of his lyrics.

The same taste for the extreme followed him into his novels “And the Ass Saw the Angel”, “The Death of Bunny Munro” and his latest book “The Sick Bag Song”, which he first wrote on airline sickbags.

In keeping with his biblical fixation, he wrote a famously erudite foreword to a new version of the “Gospel according to Mark” in 1996.

The 59-year-old singer, who now lives in England, also wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed outback western “The Proposition”, and as yet unfilmed scripts for a sequel to “Gladiator” and movie version of Brecht and Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera”.

Tom Waits

When it comes to chronicling the dark underbelly of American life, few can touch the growl-voiced Californian singer and laureate of life’s losers.

While his seminal albums like “Closing Time”, “Rain Dogs” and “Blue Valentine” have sometimes taken longer to be appreciated in his home country than abroad, he regularly makes lists of the greatest songwriters of all time.

Indeed his greatest commercial success has come when other singers have covered his songs. Bruce Springsteen — who is also often cited as a singer-poet — famously championed “Jersey Girl” which Waits wrote with his wife and collaborator screenwriter Kathleen Brennan.

His 2011 book, “Hard Ground”, in which Waits’ poems about broken and busted lives were set next to Michael O’Brien’s photographs of homeless people in Texas, was also warmly received.