The Jnanpith Award is the highest literary award in India. It is presented annually by the Bharatiya Jnanpith, a trust founded in 1961 by K. Madhava Menon, to an Indian author for their outstanding contribution to literature. The award is open to authors writing in any of the 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, and consists of a citation, a cash prize of ₹11 lakh (US$14,000), and a bronze statuette of the Hindu goddess of knowledge, Saraswati.
The first Jnanpith Award was presented in 1965 to Malayalam writer G. Shankar Kurup for his novel Odayil Ninnu (From the Cave). Since then, the award has been presented to 58 writers, including 8 women. The most recent recipient of the award is Konkani writer Damodar Mauzo, who was awarded the prize in 2022 for his novel Tiatr.
The Jnanpith Award is widely regarded as the highest literary honor in India. It is a prestigious award that recognizes the outstanding contributions of Indian writers to the world of literature.
Here is a list of all the Jnanpith Award winners, by language:
- Assamese: Lakshminath Bezbaruah, Birinchi Kumar Barua, Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Hiren Gohain, Mamoni Raisom Goswami, Homen Borgohain, Bishnu Prasad Rabha, Nilmani Phukan, Chandra Prasad Saikia, Indira Goswami
- Bengali: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Ashapurna Devi, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Manik Bandyopadhyay, Samaresh Basu, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh
- Bodo: Upendra Nath Brahma
- Dogri: Shiv Kumar Batalvi
- Gujarati: Umashankar Joshi, Pannalal Patel, Jhaverchand Meghani, K. M. Munshi, Suresh Joshi, Chandrakant Topiwala, Ramesh Bhatt, Dhiruben Patel, Narsinh Mehta
- Hindi: Munshi Premchand, Maithili Sharan Gupt, Mahadevi Verma, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Nagarjun, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Girish Karnad, Uday Prakash, Amitav Ghosh
- Kannada: Kuvempu, Shivaram Karanth, Girish Karnad, UR Ananthamurthy, Chandrashekhar Kambar, K. V. Puttappa, D. R. Bendre, G. S. Shivarudrappa, P. Lankesh, Chandrashekhar Patil
- Kashmiri: Akhtar Mohiuddin
- Konkani: Damodar Mauzo
- Maithili: Dharanidhar Verma
- Malayalam: G. Shankar Kurup, M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, K. Satchidanandan, M. Mukundan, O. N. V. Kurup, Kamala Das, Lalithambika Antharjanam, Balamani Amma, S. K. Pottekkatt
- Marathi: V. S. Khandekar, P. L. Deshpande, B. R. Bendre, Govind Sakharam Sardesai, Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar, Madhav Julian, Vinda Karandikar, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, Chandrakant Kulkarni
- Manipuri: Hijam Irabot Singh
- Nepali: Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Balkrishna Sama, Indra Bahadur Rai, Gopal Prasad Rimal, Bhupi Sherchan, Madhav Prasad Ghimire, Sambhu Prasad Subedi, Bishnu Prasad Bhattarai, Rameshwor Prasad Koirala, Manjushree Thapa
- Odia: Fakir Mohan Senapati, Gopinath Mohanty, Radhanath Ray, Biju Patnaik, Surendra Mohanty, Ramachandra Panda, Bibhu Patnaik, Pratibha Ray, Chandra Sekhar Rath, Manoj Das
- Punjabi: Amrita Pritam, Mohan Singh, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Surjit Patar, Jaswant Singh Neki, Balwant Gargi, Dalip Kaur Tiwana, Gurdial Singh Mann, Surjit Singh Sandhu, Navtej Singh
- Sanskrit: Raghunatha Varman
- Tamil: Kalki Krishnamurthy, C. Rajagopalachari, Muloor S. Radhakrishnan, Pudumaipithan, Sundara Ramaswami Iyer, Tiruvarur Kavirayar, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Kannadasan, Jayakanthan, Ambai
- Telugu: Viswanatha Satyanarayana, Gurajada Apparao, Viswanatha Satyanarayana, Viswan