WThe Sahitya Akademi Award is the second-highest literary honor in India. The Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, aims at "promoting Indian literature throughout the world". The Akademi annually confers on writers of "the most outstanding books of literary merit". The awards are given for works published in any of the 24 languages recognised by the akademi. Instituted in 1954, the award recognizes and promotes excellence in writing and acknowledge new trends. The annual process of selecting awardees runs for the preceding twelve months. As of 2015, the award comprises a plaque and a cash prize of ₹1 lakh (US$1,400).
WMulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, notable for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an International readership. Anand is admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of classics of modern Indian English literature; they are noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed and for their analysis of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune. He became known for his protest novel “Untouchable” (1935), followed by other works on the Indian poor such as “Coolie” (1936) and “Two Leaves and a Bud” (1937). He is also noted for being among the first writers to incorporate Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English, and was a recipient of the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.
WTemsüla Ao is an Indian poet, short story writer and ethnographer. She is a retired Professor of English in North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), where she has taught since 1975. She served as the Director of North East Zone Cultural Centre, Dimapur between 1992 and 1997 on deputation from NEHU.
WRupa Bajwa is an Indian writer who lives and works in Amritsar, Punjab as well as spending time in various other Indian cities and towns. She is a recipient of the Grinzane Cavour Prize, the Commonwealth Award, and India's Sahitya Akademi Award.
WUday Bhembre is an Indian lawyer, Konkani writer and a former member of the Goa Legislative Assembly. He is noted for his role as the editor of the Konkani daily, Sunaparant, and as a Konkani language activist. Bhembre is also widely known as the lyricist of the famed Goan Konkani language song Channeache Rati.
WRuskin Bond is an Indian author of British descent. He lives with his adopted family in Landour, Mussoorie, India. The Indian Council for Child Education has recognised his role in the growth of children's literature in India. He was awarded the Sahitya Academy Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, his novel in English. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.
WAmit Chaudhuri is an Indian English-language novelist, poet and essayist. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and since 2020, he also teaches at Ashoka University, India as Professor of Creative Writing. In September 2020, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the [Modern Language Association (MLA).
WNirad Chandra Chaudhuri CBE was an Indian writer.
WShashi Deshpande is an Indian novelist. She is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award.
WNissim Ezekiel was an Indian Jewish poet, actor, playwright, editor and art critic. He was a foundational figure in postcolonial India's literary history, specifically for Indian Poetry in English.
WRajmohan Gandhi is an Indian historian. He is a biographer and a research professor at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US. He is the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. He is also a scholar in residence at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar.
WAmitav Ghosh is an Indian writer and the winner of the 54th Jnanpith award, best known for his work in English fiction.
WSarvepalli Gopal was a well-known Indian historian. The son of S. Radhakrishnan, he is the author of his father's biography Radhakrishnan: A Biography and Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography.
WRamachandra Guha is an Indian writer whose research interests include environmental, social, economics, political, contemporary and cricket history. He is also a columnist for The Telegraph, Hindustan Times and Hindi Daily Newspaper Amar Ujala.
WSunetra Gupta is a British-Indian infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19, and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal Society.
WArun Joshi (1939-1993) was an Indian writer. He is known for his novels The Strange Case of Billy Biswas and The Apprentice. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel The Last Labyrinth in 1982. His novels have characters who are urban, English speaking and disturbed for some reason. According to one commentator, "The shallowness of middle class society is not for him a point of rhetoric, intended to show off his own enlightened superiority, but a theme to be explored with actual concern."
WJayanta Mahapatra is an Indian English poet. He is the first Indian poet to win a Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry. He is the author of poems such as Indian Summer and Hunger, which are regarded as classics in modern Indian English literature. He was awarded a Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian honour in India in 2009. He returned the award in 2015 to protest against rising intolerance in India.
WMeenakshi Mukherjee was a litterateur and Sahitya Akademi Award winner. Her book, "An Indian for all seasons", a biography of historian R.C. Dutt, published by Penguin, was to be released in Delhi. Mukherjee received the Sahitya Akademi award in 2003 for her book The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. She taught English literature and Critical theory at a number of colleges in Patna, Pune, Delhi and University of Hyderabad. Her last and longest spell was as Professor of English in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was a visiting professor in several universities outside India, including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, Macquarie University (Sydney), the University of Canberra and Flinders University (Adelaide). Her husband Sujit Mukherjee, was teacher and a literary scholar. They had two daughters. They lived the final years of their lives in Hyderabad.
WKiran Nagarkar was an Indian novelist, playwright and screenwriter. A noted drama and film critic, he was one of the most significant writers of post-colonial India.
WRasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, commonly known as R. K. Narayan, was an Indian writer known for his work set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He was a leading author of early Indian literature in English along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao.
WAttipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature who wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, professor, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit. He published works on both classical and modern variants of this literature and argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due. Though he wrote widely and in a number of genres, Ramanujan's poems are remembered as enigmatic works of startling originality, sophistication and moving artistry. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1999 for The Collected Poems.
WRaja Rao was an Indian writer of English-language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide-ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literature, as well as World literature as a whole.
WNayantara Sahgal is an Indian writer who writes in English. She is a member of the Nehru–Gandhi family, the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
WIrwin Allan Sealy is an Indian writer. His novel The Everest Hotel: A Calendar was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker prize.
WVikram Seth is an Indian novelist and poet. He has written several novels and poetry books. He has received several awards such as Padma Shri, Sahitya Academy Award, Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, WH Smith Literary Award and Crossword Book Award. Seth's collections of poetry such as Mappings and Beastly Tales are notable contributions to the Indian English language poetry canon.
WKodaganallur Ramaswami Srinivasa Iyengar (1908–1999), popularly known as K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, was an Indian writer in English, former vice-chancellor of Andhra University. He was given the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1985.
WKamala Surayya , popularly known by her one-time pen name Madhavikutty and married name Kamala Das, was an Indian poet in English as well as an author in Malayalam from Kerala, India. Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography, while her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for the poems and explicit autobiography. She was also a widely read columnist and wrote on diverse topics including women's issues, child care, politics among others.
WJeet Thayil is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is best known as a poet and is the author of four collections: These Errors Are Correct, English, Apocalypso and Gemini. His first novel, Narcopolis,, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize.