Jnanpith Award

Jnanpith Award is being given for the best creative literary writing by any Indian citizen in any of the languages included in the VIII Schedule of the Indian Constitution. The Award is the brain-child of late Smt. Rama Jain, the first President of and the moving spirit behind the Bharatiya Jnanpith since its inception. It has become the most prestigious literary award of the country. This awards inlude sum of Rs. 5 lakhs including citation. Since 1965, thirty-nine eminent writers have received the award in thirty-six years.  On three occasions, the award was shared by two authors. The award has gone so far seven times to Kannada, six times to Hindi, five times to Bangla, four times to Malayalam, thrice each to Oriya and Urdu, twice each to Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu and Punjabi, and once to Tamil.

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G. Sankara Kurup (1965) Malayalam

T.S. Bandyopadhyaya (1966) Bangla, Uma Shankar Joshi (1967) Gujarati and K.V.

Puttappa (1967) Kannada

Sumitranandan Pant (1968) Hindi

Firaq Gorakhpuri (1969) Urdu

V. Satyanarayana (1970) Telugu

Bishnu Dey (1971) Bangla

R.S. Dinkar (1972) Hindi and D.R. Bendre (1973) Kannada, Gopinath Mohanty (1973)

Oriya V.S. Khandekar (1974) Marathi

P.V. Akilandam (1975) Tamil

Ashapurna Devi (1976) Bangla

K.S. Karanth (1977) Kannada

S.H.V. Ajneya (1978) Hindi

B.K. Bhattacharya (1979) Assamese

S.K. Pottekkatt (1980) Malayalam, Amrita Pritam (1981) Panjabi

Mahadevi Varma (1982) Hindi

Masti V. Iyengar (1983) Kannada

Thakazhi S. Pillai (1984) Malayalam

Pannalal Patel (1985) Gujarati

S. Rautroy (1986) Oriya

V.V.S. ‘Kusumagraj’ (1987) Marathi

C. Narayana Reddy (1988) Telugu

Qurratulain Hyder (1989) Urdu

V.K. Gokak (1990) Kannada

Subhash Mukhopadhyaya (1991) Bangla

Naresh Mehta (1992) Hindi

Sitakant Mahapatra (1993) Oriya

U.R. Anantha Murthy (1994) Kannada

M.T. Vasudevan Nair (1995) Malayalam

Mahasveta Devi (1996) Bangla

Ali Sardar Jafri (1997) Urdu

Girish Karnad (1998) Kannada

Nirmal Verma (1999) Hindi, Gurdial Singh (1999) Punjabi

Indira Goswami (2000) Assamese.

Rajendra Shah (2001) Gujrati

D. Jayakantan (2002) Tamil

Vinda Karandikar (2003) Marathi

Rahman Rahi (2004) Kashmiri

Kunwar Narain (2005) Hindi

Satya Vrat Shastri (2006) Sanskrit, Ravindra Kelekar (2006) Konkani