Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Recognising outstanding literary works in 24 Indian languages, the Sahitya Akademi on March 16 announced the winners of its awards for 2025. The award for the English language novel went to former diplomat Navtej Sarna for ‘Crimson Spring’, a novel set around the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919. Sarna, 68, spent four decades in the Indian Foreign Service—serving as India’s ambassador to the United States, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and the foreign ministry’s longest-serving spokesperson under two prime ministers. He retired in 2018 to write full-time.
Mamta Kalia, 85, has been selected for ‘Jeete Jee Allahabad’—a literary memoir in Hindi of the city, now officially renamed Prayagraj. Kalia has been writing Hindi fiction about middle-class Indian women since the 1960s and won the Vyas Samman in 2017. The Malayalam award went to N. Prabhakaran for the novel ‘Maayaamanushyar’, described as a meditation on human compassion and the forces that obstruct it.
According to the Ministry of Culture, the awards this year cover a range of literary genres including poetry, novels, short stories, essays, literary criticism, autobiography and memoirs.
Among the selected works are eight poetry collections, four novels, six short story collections, two essay volumes, one work of literary criticism, one autobiography and two memoirs. Other award-winning works include Prasun Bandyopadhyay’s poetry collection “Shrestha Kabita” (Bengali), Yogesh Vaidya’s “Bhattkhadaki” (Gujarati poetry) and Nandini Sidha Reddy’s Telugu poetry collection “Animesha.”
