Jnanpith Award is the oldest and the highest Indian literary award presented annually by the Bharatiya Jnanpith to an author for their "outstanding contribution towards literature". The Bharatiya Jnanpith, a research and cultural institute founded in 1944 by industrialist Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain of the Sahu Jain family, conceived an idea in May 1961 to start a scheme "commanding national prestige and of international standard" to "select the best book out of the publications in Indian languages".
The first prize was won in 1965 for G. Sankarakuruppu's collection of poems'Odakkuzhal'. G Shankara Kurup (The first poet in Malayalam literature) received the award in 1965. S.K. Pottakkad (1980), Takashi Sivasankarappilla (1984), MT Vasudevan Nair (1995), ONV. Kurup (2007) and Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri (2019) are the other poets who won the Jnanpith Award for their contributions to Malayalam literature.
Year | Jnanpith Award winners | Language |
---|---|---|
1965 | G. Sankara Kurup | Malayalam |
1966 | Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya | Bengali |
1967 | Kuppali Venkatappagowda Puttappa | Kannada |
1967 | Umashankar Joshi | Gujarati |
1968 | Sumitranandan Pant | Hindi |
1969 | Firaq Gorakhpuri | Urdu |
1970 | Viswanatha Satyanarayana | Telugu |
1971 | Bishnu Dey | Bengali |
1972 | Ramdhari Singh Dinkar | Hindi |
1973 | Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre | Kannada |
1973 | Gopinath Mohanty | Oriya |
1974 | Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar | Marathi |
1975 | P. V. Akilan | Tamil |
1976 | Ashapurna Devi | Bengali |
1977 | K. Shivaram Karanth K. Shivaram Karanth | Kannada |
1978 | Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Ajneya’ | Hindi |
1979 | Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya | Assamese |
1980 | S. K. Pottekkatt | Malayalam |
1981 | Amrita Pritam | Punjabi |
1982 | Mahadevi Varma | Hindi |
1983 | Masti Venkatesh Iyengar | Kannada |
1984 | Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai | Malayalam |
1985 | Pannalal Patel | Gujarati |
1986 | Sachidananda Routray | Oriya |
1987 | Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkaray | Marathi |
1988 | Dr.C. Narayana Reddy | Telugu |
1989 | Qurratulain Hyder | Urdu |
1990 | Vinayaka Krishna Gokak | Kannada |
1991 | Subhas Mukhopadhyay | Bengali |
1992 | Naresh Mehta | Hindi |
1993 | Sitakant Mahapatra | Oriya |
1994 | U. R. Ananthamurthy | Kannada |
1995 | M.T. Vasudevan Nair | Malayalam |
1996 | Mahasweta Devi | Bengali |
1997 | Ali Sardar Jafri | Urdu |
1998 | Girish Karnad | Kannada |
1999 | Gurdial Singh | Punjabi |
1999 | Nirmal Verma | Hindi |
2000 | Indira Goswami | Assamese |
2001 | D. Jayakanthan | Tamil |
2003 | Vinda Karandikar | Marathi |
2004 | Rehman Rahi | Kashmiri |
2005 | Kunwar Narayan | Hindi |
2006 | Ravindra Kelekar | Konkani |
2006 | Satya Vrat Shastri | Sanskrit |
2007 | ONV.Kurup | Malayalam |
2008 | Akhlaq Mohammed Khan | Urdu |
2009 | Amar Kant | Hindi |
2009 | Shrilal Shukla | Hindi |
2010 | Chandrashekhara Kambara | Kannada |
2011 | Pratibha Ray | Oriya |
2012 | Ravauri Bharadwaja | Telegu |
2013 | Kedarnath Singh | Hindi |
2014 | Bhalchandra Nemade | Marathi |
2015 | Dr. Raghuvir Chaudhari | Gujarati |
2016 | Shanka Ghosh | Bengali |
2017 | Krishna Sobti | Hindi |
2018 | Amitav Ghosh | English |
2019 | Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri | Malayalam |