• Sahitya Akademi, India’s premier literary institution working under the Ministry of Culture, is organising its annual literature festival from March 7 to 12.

• Sahitya Akademi’s ‘Sahityotsav: The Festival of Letters’, will host 722 authors, poets and other notable figures of 53 Indian languages in nearly 120 sessions, starting from March 7 in New Delhi.

• The festival is set around the theme of ‘Indian Literary Traditions: Heritage and Evolution’. 

• On March 8, the academy will felicitate 23 winners of the Sahitya Akademi Award. 

• The six-day festival will also put a spotlight on writings from the Northeast, tribal regions and LGBTQ community through panel discussions, writers and poets’ meets, and book readings.

• The festival will take place in the Rabindra Bhawan Lawns, Kamani Auditorium, Art Galleries of Lalit Kala Akademi and Sahitya Akademi Auditoriums.

Sahitya Akademi

• Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, was established in March 1954 by the government of India. 

• It is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with the objectives to work for the development of Indian letters and to set high literary standards, foster and co-ordinate literary activities in all the Indian languages and promote through them the cultural unity of the country.

It aims to:

i) Promote good taste and healthy reading habits.

ii) Keep alive the intimate dialogue among the various linguistic and literary zones and groups through seminars, symposia, lectures, discussions and readings.

iii) Increase the pace of mutual translations through workshops and individual assignments.

iv) Develop a serious literary culture through publication of translations, journals, monographs, individual creative works of every genre, anthologies, encyclopedia, bibliographies, histories of literatures, dictionaries, etc. 

• The Akademi has a special programme called Gramalok for the writers from remote village areas.

• The Akademi has recently introduced a new programme titled Dalit Chetna to give exposure especially to Dalit writers. 

• Akademi gives 24 awards annually to literary works in the languages it has recognised and an equal number of awards to literary translations from and into the languages of India, both after a year-long process of scrutiny, discussion and selection.

• Sahitya Akademi bestows Bal Sahitya Puraskar on the best literary works in the field of children’s literature and Yuva Puraskar for young writers who have achieved excellence in creative writing and Bhasha Samman for significant contribution to classical and medieval literature and unrecognised languages. 

• It also awards fellowships and honorary fellowships to eminent writers, Indian and non-Indian, and Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy Fellowship and Premchand Fellowship to a person of eminence in the field of art, culture, literature and language studies, and to scholars doing research on Indian literature or to creative writers from the SAARC countries other than India.

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