Novelist Amitav Ghosh wins Jnanpith Award 2018
English writer Amitav Ghosh has been honored with 2018 Jnanpith Award, a literary award given to an author for “outstanding contribution towards literature”, Bharatiya Jyanpeeth announced Friday.
For the first time, Jnanpith’s award (Jnanpith award 2018) has been given to any English writer.
About Amitav Ghosh:
Amitav Ghosh is Born in Kolkata in 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family, the 62-year-old author currently lives in New York with his wife Deborah Baker. He is an alumnus of Doon School, Dehradun in Uttarakhand, St Stephen’s College, Delhi University and Delhi School of Economics. He was awarded Padmashree in 2007 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. He was also named the Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow in 2015.
Books by Amitav Ghosh:
1. The Circle of Reason (1986) was his first novel.
2. The Shadow Lines (1988)
3. The Calcutta Chromosome (1995)
4. The Glass Palace (2000)
5. The Hungry Tide (2004)
6. Sea of Poppies (2008): First volume part of The Ibis trilogy
7. River of Smoke (2011): Second volume of The Ibis trilogy
8. Flood of Fire (2015): Third volume of The Ibis trilogy
9. Antique Land (1992)
10.Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998)
11.Countdown (1999)
12.The Imam and the Indian (2002)
13.The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
* Note: These are some important books by Amitav Ghosh, which are important for upcoming competitive exams.
What is the Jnanpith Award?
The Gyanpeeth Award by the Indian Jnanpith Trust is the highest award given for Indian literature. Indian Gyanpeeth Award was established in the year 1965. Any person of the country who writes in any of the 22 languages mentioned in the 8th Schedule of Indian Constitution deserves this award. So far, the writers of Hindi and Kannada have attained the highest 7 times this honor. In the year 1965 Malayalam writer, G. Shankar Kurup was honored with the first Gyanpeeth Award.
Established – 1965
prize money – 11 lakhs
First winner – Jai Shankar Kurup (Malayalam)
India’s first woman winner – Ashapurna Devi (Bengali)
Last Winner – Krishna Sobati (2017)
Jnanpith award is the Highest Award for Indian Literature
How much prize money is given in the Gyanpeeth Award?
11 lakhs of prize money, citation, and Vagdevi bronze statue are provided in this. When the Gyanpeeth Award was instituted in 1965, then the prize money was only one lakh rupees at that time. In the year 2005, the prize money was increased from Rs one lakh to Rs 7 lakh, which has now turned into eleven lakh rupees.
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