Theatre writer, translator Pratibha Agrawal honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize

New Delhi: The Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize 2017 for Hindi was conferred on veteran scholar-translator Pratibha Agrawal in Delhi on 7 August. The Sahitya Akademi awarded her for her Hindi translation of author Sombhu Mitra’s Abhinay Natak Manch in the Rangmunch genre. The original title is in Bengali. [caption id=“attachment_4919231” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Theatre writer, director, actress and translator Pratibha Agrawal was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize for her translation of Sombhu Mitra’s Abhinay Natak Manch. Twitter/@sahityaakademi[/caption] Born in 1930, Agrawal is a renowned theatre scriptwriter, director, actor and translator. She is the director of Natya Shodh Sansthan, a Kolkata-based archive covering the history of Indian theatre, founded in 1981. Agrawal has to her credit translations of Henrik Ibsen’s Janata ka Shatru (1959), Rabindranath Tagore’s Shesh Raksha (1963), Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit (1969), and Utpal Dutt’s Tin ki Talwar, among others. She is a Ratna Sadasya (1975) of the Uttar Pradesh Sangeet Natak Akademi, and has been honoured for her literary work by the Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sansthan (1989), the Madhya Pradesh Sahitya Parishad (1993), and the Bharatiya Anuvad Parishad (1997). She has received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 2005 for her overall contribution to Indian theatre. Due to ill health, Agrawal could not attend the official award-giving ceremony in Guwahati on 22 June, Akademi Secretary K. Sreenivasa Rao said at the event. The annual award consisting of a plaque and Rs 50,000 was instituted in 1989 for recognising outstanding translations in 24 languages.