Books & Authors Quiz: Jnanpith and Sahitya Akademi Winners

The Malayalam poet, known simply as Akkitham, received the 55th Jnanpith Award, given for the year 2019. He was the sixth Malayalam writer to be honoured, the language whose G. Sankara Kurup had won the very first Jnanpith for 1965.

The Jnanpith Award was instituted in 1961 by Bharatiya Jnanpith, and it is regarded as the highest literary honour given in India.

The Malayalam poet received the first Jnanpith Award, for the year 1965, for his collection of poems Odakkuzhal, meaning the reed flute.

The Bengali novelist received the Jnanpith for the year 1976 for Pratham Pratishruti, the first book of a trilogy about three generations of women in a Bengali household, and she was the first woman to be honoured with the award.

Along with a citation and a cash prize, every Jnanpith laureate receives a bronze replica of Vagdevi, Saraswati as the goddess of speech and learning, which is a fitting emblem for a literary honour and a detail asked directly in objective papers.

English was not an eligible language for the Jnanpith until 2013, when it was added to the languages of the Eighth Schedule for the purpose of this award.

The Government of India set up the Sahitya Akademi on 12 March 1954 as the national academy for literature, and it works today as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with its headquarters at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi.

The Prime Minister was the first President of the Sahitya Akademi, elected when the academy was set up in 1954, and he held the office until his death in 1964.

The Sahitya Akademi recognises twenty-four languages and gives one award in each of them every year for the most outstanding book of literary merit, so roughly two dozen names are announced together.

The Fellowship, not the annual award, is the highest honour the Sahitya Akademi confers, and its rules restrict it to twenty-one living writers at any one time.

She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for her Punjabi poetry collection Sunehe, meaning messages, and was the first woman to be honoured by the Akademi.

The building on Feroze Shah Road, named after Rabindranath Tagore, houses all three of India's national academies, the Sahitya Akademi for letters, the Lalit Kala Akademi for the fine arts and the Sangeet Natak Akademi for the performing arts.