List of Sahitya Akademi fellows
| Sahitya Akademi fellowship | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awarded by Sahitya Akademi | |||||
| Category | Literature (Individual) | ||||
| Description | |||||
| Description | Literary award in India | ||||
| Statistics | |||||
| Instituted | 1968 | ||||
| First awarded | 1968 | ||||
| Last awarded | 2016 | ||||
| Total awarded | 92 | ||||
| First awardee(s) | Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan | ||||
| Last awardee(s) | |||||
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The Sahitya Akademi fellowship is an Indian literary honour bestowed by the Sahitya Akademi. It is the highest honour conferred by Akademi exclusively on Indian writers, and is given for the "immortals of literature". Conceptualized in December 1952, the Sahitya Akademi is India's National Academy of letters. It was formally inaugurated by the Government of India on 12 March 1954. The then Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru was appointed as its first President, the then Vice-President of India Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan as Vice-President of the Akademi, and Krishna Kripalani as its first General Secretary. Though the Akademi was established under the Government of India Resolution No. F.6-4/51 G 2(A) dated 15 December 1952, it functions as an autonomous organization and the General Council of the Akademi has an authority to amend its Constitution. It was registered as a society on 7 January 1956, under the Societies Registration Act, 1860.
The Akademi primarily works for the "development of Indian letters and to set high literary standards, to foster and co-ordinate literary activities in all the Indian languages and to promote through them all the cultural unity of the country". The organization recognizes the only languages included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India, along with English and Rajasthani. The Executive Board of the Akademi recommends the names of literary persons to be elected as fellows and Honorary fellows to the General Council. The General Council, who operates for the period of five years, holds an authority to elect a fellow based on the recommendation made by the Executive Board.
The fellowship was established in 1968 and is limited to 21 individuals at any given time, with no posthumous conferrals. As of 2016[update], the fellowship has been conferred on 92 writers, including seven women authors. The first elected fellow was the philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. In 1979, Hindi poetess Mahadevi Varma became the first woman to be elected as a fellow, followed by three women writers in 1994 (Malayalam poetess Balamani Amma, Bengali novelist and poetess Ashapoorna Devi, and Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder). Hindi author Krishna Sobti was honoured in 1996, and English novelist Anita Desai in 2009. On 16 February 2016, the Akademi announced the fellowship to Punjabi writer and novelist Gurdial Singh and Bengali poet Nirendranath Chakravarty. As of 2016[update], there are only 20 fellows of the Sahitya Akademi.
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