Books & Authors Quiz: Famous Indian Women Writers and Their Works

She received the Jnanpith Award in 1976 for the Bengali novel Pratham Pratishruti, the first part of a trilogy that follows three generations of women in a Bengali household, and she was the first woman to receive the award in its history.

The Golden Threshold, published in 1905, was her first collection of poems in English, and it was followed by The Bird of Time in 1912 and The Broken Wing in 1917.

Arundhati Roy's first novel, set in Ayemenem in Kerala and built around the twins Rahel and Estha, won the Booker Prize in 1997, the fiftieth year of Indian independence.

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories about Indian and Indian-American lives, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, making Lahiri the first writer of Indian origin to win that prize for fiction.

Geetanjali Shree's novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book written in Hindi, and the first from any Indian language, to take that prize.

Amrita Pritam is the best known woman writer of modern Punjabi, and the Jnanpith Award of 1981 was given to her for the Punjabi poetry collection Kagaz Te Canvas.

Stri Purush Tulana, a Marathi tract published in 1882, argued that the standards society applied to women were far harsher than those applied to men, and it is studied as one of the earliest feminist writings in any Indian language.

Yama, a collection that brings together her earlier volumes of verse, won her the Jnanpith Award in 1982.

Hajar Churashir Maa, written in Bengali in 1974, follows a mother who learns that her son, killed as a Naxalite, is only a corpse number in a police register, and it was later filmed in Hindi as Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa.

My Story is her frank autobiography, first serialised and then published as a book, and she wrote English poetry as Kamala Das while publishing Malayalam fiction and prose under the pen name Madhavikutty.