Goemkarponn desk
PANAJI: At a prestigious ceremony at the national level, Governor of Goa P. S. Sreedharan Pillai will present the Jnanpith Award to Damodar Mauzo, a Goan Konkani writer, on 27th May at the Raj Bhavan at 5 pm.
The 57th Jnanpith Award ceremony will also be graced by Gulzar, a Special Guest and an internationally acclaimed Urdu poet, author, lyricist, and filmmaker. Shri Govind Gaude, Minister for Cultural Affairs, would be the Guest of Honour.
Justice Virendra Jain, President of the Bharatiya Jnanpith, and Smt Pratibha Ray, Chairperson of the Selection Board, would also grace the occasion besides several other luminaries from the fields of literature, art, theatre and cinema.
The national-level ceremony would be held by Bharatiya Jnanpith in collaboration with the Directorate of Art & Culture, Govt. of Goa, and KLJ Group.
79-year-old Shri Damodar Mauzo is a novelist, short story writer, critic, and scriptwriter from Goa. He has several published works to his credit in Konkani and English. Karmelin, his Konkani novel that bagged the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award in 1983, has created a sort of record in the field of Indian literature. It has been translated into fourteen Indian languages, and four translations into Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi, and Maithili have also won the Sahitya Akademi Translation awards.
Born on 1st August 1944 in Goa, Shri Mauzo did his early schooling up to Primeiro Grau in Portuguese, alongside Marathi primary. He graduated in Commerce from R. A. Podar College of Commerce & Economics in Mumbai.
Many of his short stories are translated into several Indian languages, including English, Portuguese, and French. One of the collections of his stories, Teresa’s Man, was nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Award in the year 2015. Winner of several literary awards that include the Sahitya Akademi Award, Katha Award, V. V. Pai Sahitya Puraskar, State Cultural Award, etc. Mauzo has recently been conferred the “Basava Vibhushan Award 2023” by the Basava Samiti, Bangalore, Karnataka. He is the co-founder and co-curator of the Goa Arts and Literature Festival and a founding member of PEN-South India, an International writers’ collective.
Bharatiya Jnanpith, founded in 1944, by Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain and Late Smt. Rama Jain is serving the Nation through literature for more than the almost last eight decades. Jnanpith Award, instituted by this philanthropic couple has gradually emerged as the highest literary award of the country and so far Jnanpith has been conferred to sixty-two laureates including Shri Damodar Mauzo. This is the second time any Konkani author received the Jnanpith Award. The first recipient was the legendary Ravindra Kelekar.
Bharatiya Jnanpith is a trust and is managed by a Board of Trustees.
The organisers have conveyed that although the ceremony is open for all, the invitees need to register themselves on a google form and carry their identity proof on the venue to attend the award ceremony. The google form to register is as follows: https://forms.gle/bhUY6wV7wQMBubRE9
There is bus arrangement from Margao and Canacona to travel to Raj Bhavan and those who are willing to come on the bus may contact 9765661189 (Sagar) for Margao and 9923534647 (Sajjan) for Canacona.
For any further information about the program, one may contact 9923442746 (Anwesha).
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