The Saraswati Samman is an annual award for outstanding prose or poetry literary works in any of the 22 languages of India listed in Schedule VIII of the Constitution of India. It is named after the Hindu goddess of knowledge, Saraswati.
The Saraswati Samman was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla Foundation. It consists of ₹15,00,000, a citation and a plaque. Candidates are selected from literary works published in the previous ten years by a panel that included scholars and former award winners. The inaugural award was given to Harivanshrai 'Bachchan' for his four volume autobiography, Kya Bhooloon Kya Yaad Karoon, Needa Ka Nirman Phir, Basere Se Door and Dashdwar se Sopan Tak.
Here is a list of all the Saraswati Samman winners, by language:
- Assamese: Lakshminath Bezbaruah (1991)
- Bengali: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1992)
- Bodo: Upendra Nath Brahma (1993)
- Dogri: Shiv Kumar Batalvi (1994)
- Gujarati: Umashankar Joshi (1995)
- Hindi: Maithili Sharan Gupt (1996)
- Kannada: Kuvempu (1997)
- Kashmiri: Akhtar Mohiuddin (1998)
- Konkani: Damodar Mauzo (1999)
- Maithili: Dharanidhar Verma (2000)
- Malayalam: G. Shankar Kurup (2001)
- Marathi: V. S. Khandekar (2002)
- Manipuri: Hijam Irabot Singh (2003)
- Nepali: Laxmi Prasad Devkota (2004)
- Odia: Fakir Mohan Senapati (2005)
- Punjabi: Amrita Pritam (2006)
- Sanskrit: Raghunatha Varman (2007)
- Tamil: Kalki Krishnamurthy (2008)
- Telugu: Viswanatha Satyanarayana (2009)
- Urdu: Firaq Gorakhpuri (2010)
- English: Amitav Ghosh (2011)
- Hindi: Mahadevi Verma (2012)
- Kannada: Girish Karnad (2013)
- Malayalam: K. Satchidanandan (2014)
- Marathi: Vinda Karandikar (2015)
- Manipuri: Wangkheirakpam Chaoba Singh (2016)
- Nepali: Madhav Prasad Ghimire (2017)
- Odia: Surendra Mohanty (2018)
- Punjabi: Surjit Patar (2019)
- Sanskrit: Vidyabhushana Varman (2020)
- Tamil: Sivasankari (2021)
- Telugu: Gurajada Apparao (2022)
The Saraswati Samman is a prestigious award that recognizes the outstanding contributions of Indian writers to the world of literature.