Who became the first writer in English to receive the Jnanpith Award?

Explanation

Amitav Ghosh received the 54th Jnanpith Award for 2018, becoming the first writer in English to receive India's highest literary honour. English had been added to the list of languages eligible for the award only shortly before this.

Amitav Ghosh was born in 1956 in Kolkata. He studied in Delhi and later earned a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Oxford. His novels are known for their deep historical research, their wide geographical range and their themes of migration, colonialism, identity and the relationship between people and nature. His famous works include "The Shadow Lines" (1988), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award, "The Glass Palace" (2000), "The Hungry Tide" (2004), set in the Sundarbans, and the "Ibis Trilogy", made up of "Sea of Poppies" (2008), "River of Smoke" (2011) and "Flood of Fire" (2015), which tells the story of the opium trade between India and China in the 19th century. His non-fiction book "The Great Derangement" (2016) deals with climate change. He received the Padma Shri in 2007.

The Jnanpith Award is given by the Bharatiya Jnanpith, a literary and cultural organisation founded in 1944 by the Sahu Jain family. It was first given in 1965, to the Malayalam poet G. Sankara Kurup for his collection "Odakkuzhal". It is given for outstanding contribution to literature in the languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, and English was later added. The first woman to receive it was Ashapoorna Devi (Bengali, 1976).

Why not the other options?

• ✗Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize (1981) for "Midnight's Children".
• ✗Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize (1997) for "The God of Small Things".
• ✗Vikram Seth is famous for the novel "A Suitable Boy".
• ✗None of them has received the Jnanpith Award.