Sahitya Akademi Awards 2020: Arundhati Subramaniam, Venita Coelho among winners

Politician-writer M Veerappa Moily, poet Arundhathi Subramaniam are among 20 writers who will be bestowed with the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020. The national academy of letters announced the names on 12 March during the opening day of its annual Festival of Letters event. While Subramaniam won the award for her poetry collection When God is a Traveller in English, Moily was named for his epic poetry titled Sri Bahubali Ahimsadigvijayam in Kannada. The list includes seven books of poetry, four novels, five short stories, two plays, and one each of memoirs and epic poetry in 20 Indian languages. The awards for Malayalam, Nepali, Odia and Rajasthani languages will be announced at a later date, the Akademi said in a statement. Apart from Subramaniam, the others who won the award in poetry include Harish Meenakshi (Gujarati), Anamika (Hindi), RS Bhaskar (Konkani), Irungbam Deven (Manipuri), Rupchand Hansda (Santali), and Nikhileswar (Telugu). [caption id=“attachment_9412771” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Venita Coelho won the Bal Puraskar for her work, Dead as a Dodo. Arundhati Subramaniam received the award for her collection, When God is a Traveller.[/caption] Nanda Khare (Marathi), Maheshchandra Sharma Gautam (Sanskrit), Imaiyam (Tamil) and Sri Hussain-ul-Haque were named as winners for their novels. Apurba Kumar Saikia (Assamese), (late) Dharanidhar Owari (Bodo), (late) Hiday Koul Bharti (Kashmiri), Kamakant Jha (Maithili) and Gurdev Singh Rupana (Punjab) have received the award for short stories. The Akademi has named Gian Singh (Dogri) and Jetho Lalwani (Sindhi) the winners for their plays, while Shankar (Mani Shankar Mukhopadhyay) in (Bengali) received the award for memoir. While writer-director Venita Coelho has been named as the recipient for the Bal Sahitya Puraskar 2020 for her book Dead as a Dodo, English author Yashica Dutt received the Yuva Puraskar for her memoir Coming Out As Dalit among other recipients of the respective awards. “The books were selected on the basis of recommendations made by a jury of three members in the concerned languages in accordance with the procedure laid down for the purpose. “According to the procedure, the Executive Board declared the Awards on the basis of unanimous selections made by the jurors or selection made on the basis of majority vote. The awards relate to books first published during the five years immediately preceding the year of award (ie between 1 January, 2014 and 31 December, 2018),” the Akademi said. The award, which will include a casket containing an engraved copper plaque, a shawl and an amount of Rs 1,00,000, will be presented at the award presentation function, which will be held at a later date. (With additional inputs from Press Trust of India)