Awards & Honours Quiz: Literary Awards of India

The Vyas Samman was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla Foundation and is given for an outstanding literary work in Hindi published in the previous ten years.

The Malayalam poet, known simply as Akkitham, received the 55th Jnanpith Award, given for the year 2019. The Jnanpith is instituted by Bharatiya Jnanpith and is regarded as the highest literary award in India.

The foundation instituted the Saraswati Samman in 1991 for an outstanding literary work in any of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, published in the previous ten years, and the award carries the largest cash prize of any Indian literary honour.

The Hindi poet of the Chhayavaad and Halavaad periods, best known for Madhushala, received the first Saraswati Samman in 1991 for his autobiography written in four volumes.

The trust that gives the Jnanpith Award instituted the Moortidevi Award in 1983 for a creative work that carries the spirit of Indian philosophy and culture, and the work may be in any of the languages of the Eighth Schedule or in English.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of Gitanjali in his own English rendering, and he was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field.

Arundhati Roy's first novel, set in Ayemenem in Kerala and built around a pair of twins, won the Booker Prize in 1997, and she was the first Indian woman and the first writer living in India to win it.

The International Booker Prize honours a book translated into English, and the award is shared between the author and the translator.

The Akademi gives its annual award in the twenty-four languages it recognises, and it instituted the Bhasha Samman in 1996 to honour writers and scholars working in languages outside that list, as well as those who contribute to classical and medieval literature.

The Bihari Puraskar was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla Foundation and goes to a writer from Rajasthan for a work in Hindi or Rajasthani.

The collection of nine short stories, most of them about Indians and Indian Americans living between two countries, was Jhumpa Lahiri's first book and won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, an unusual honour for a debut collection of stories.

The JCB Prize for Literature was instituted in 2018 for a work of fiction by an Indian writer, and a novel translated into English from an Indian language is eligible, with a separate sum going to the translator when a translated book wins.