Who received the Jnanpith Award for the year 2016?

Concept

The Jnanpith Award is India's highest literary honour, conferred annually by the Bharatiya Jnanpith on an author for an outstanding contribution to Indian literature. Each award is identified by the calendar year it is given for, so "the Jnanpith Award for 2016" refers to the recipient of the 52nd Jnanpith Award.

Application

The 52nd Jnanpith Award, for the year 2016, was conferred on the eminent Bengali poet and critic Shankh Ghosh. He was recognised for his decades of poetry and literary criticism in Bengali, which makes Shankh Ghosh the correct recipient for 2016.

How the other names differ

• Raghubir Chaudhary is a distinguished Gujarati novelist and poet whose Jnanpith recognition belongs to the previous award year (2015), not 2016.

• Nasira Sharma is a Hindi author honoured by the Sahitya Akademi for her fiction; the Sahitya Akademi Award is a separate honour from the Jnanpith.

• Mahasweta Devi was a celebrated Bengali writer who had already received the Jnanpith two decades earlier (in 1996), so she is not the 2016 recipient.

Result

Hence, the Jnanpith Award for the year 2016 was received by Shankh Ghosh.