Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award announced

The fifth edition of the prestigious Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award for Poetry has been awarded to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, a well-known name to readers of contemporary literature. Mehrotra will be felicitated at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2020 at Diggi Palace at Charbagh on January 23, 2020 at 1:40 pm.

Every year, the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival celebrates poetry as one of literature's most effective and powerful art forms and recognises the best among India's plethora of young and talented poets, and announces the Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia Award for Poetry. Mahakavi Kanhaiyalal Sethia was a renowned Rajasthani and Hindi poet. The internationally-acclaimed writer authored a total of 42 books in Hindi, Urdu and Rajasthani. He was a freedom fighter, social reformer, educationist and environmentalist who received the Padma Shri in 2004, the Rajasthan Ratna in 2012, apart from a Sahitya Akademi Award. He was selected as a "Living Legend of the 20th Century" on the occasion of the bi-centenary celebration of the US Library of Congress in Washington.

This year's awardee Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, born in Lahore in 1947, is an eminent poet of English besides being a scholar and a translator of verse. His six collections of poems in English include Nine Closures (1976), Clearing House (1982), The Transfiguring Places: Poems (1998), Collected Poems (2014). Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from the ancient Prakrit language as well as from Hindi, Bengali and Gujrati. His translation of Prakrit love poems, The Absent Traveller and Songs of Kabir, have been widely read and appreciated.