Sahitya Akademi Fellowship for Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay has been selected as a Sahitya Akademi Fellow, only the third Bengali author to be given this prestigious recognition, after Subhas Mukhopadhyay and Nirendranath Chakraborty.
Bengali wordsmith and one of the most celebrated authors of the present generation Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay (85) has become a fellow of the Sahitya Akademi. This comes 33 years after he won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel, Manabjamin.
He is only the third Bengali author to be selected for the prestigious fellowship, the other two being Subhas Mukhopadhyay and Nirendranath Chakraborty. The fellows picked up are considered by many to be ‘immortals of Indian literature’.
Eight writers from across India have been selected this year for the fellowship. Besides Mukhopadhyay, there is Ruskin Bond (English), Vinod Kumar Shukla (Hindi), M Leelavathy (Malayalam), Dr Bhalchandra Nemade (Marathi), Tejwant Singh Gill (Punjabi), Swami Rambhadracharya (Sanskrit) and Indira Parthasarathy (Tamil).
The number of Sahitya Akademi Fellows at no point in time exceeds 21.Sahitya Akademi President Chandrashekhar Kambar and the general council of the organisation announced the names.
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay is one of the most celebrated names in the Bengali literary world, a must-have on Bengali bookshelves and probably the chief architect of children’s imaginary worlds. He has multiple famous titles to his name, Manojder Adbhut Bari, Nayan Shyama and Parapar, to name a just a few.
The selection of Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay as a Sahitya Akademi Fellow has brought an air of joy to the Bengali literary world.
At the function announcing the fellowship, the awards for 2020 were given away too, which had been announced in March. Mani Shankar Mukhopadhyay, popularly known as Shankar, received an award for the memoir, Eka Eka Ekashi.
Another award had a Bengali connection too. K Chellappan won one of the awards for translation, for translating Rabindranath Tagore’s famous novel Gora, into Tamil.
