GK Questions

The 58th Jnanpith Award for 2023 was given jointly to Gulzar (the poet-lyricist-filmmaker, for Urdu literature) and Jagadguru Rambhadracharya (Sanskrit scholar, devotional poet, and founder of Tulsi Peeth at Chitrakoot, for Sanskrit literature). Gulzar had previously received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2013. This was the sixth joint award in the prize's history.

Amitav Ghosh received the 54th Jnanpith Award in 2018. English was added to the list of eligible languages in 2013, and Ghosh became the first — and, as of 2025, the only — writer in English to win the award. His novels engage with colonialism, migration, and environmental history across the Indian Ocean world.

18. Vairamuthu was named the recipient of the 60th Jnanpith Award for 2025, announced by Bharatiya Jnanpith in March 2026. He is the third Tamil writer to receive the award after Akilan (1975) and Jayakanthan (2002), and the first to be honoured primarily for poetry rather than prose. The selection committee was chaired by Pratibha Ray, who herself won the Jnanpith in 2011.

Ashapoorna Devi became the first woman to win the Jnanpith Award in 1976 — eleven years after the prize was first given. She was honoured for her Bengali novel Prothom Protishruti (The First Promise, 1965), the opening volume of a trilogy tracing three generations of women in Bengal. Eight women in total have won the award through 2025.

7. Sankara Kurup, a Malayalam poet, received the inaugural Jnanpith Award in 1965 for his poetry collection Odakkuzhal (The Bamboo Flute), published in 1950. The citation ceremony was held on 19 November 1966. Kurup was the first of sixty recipients across sixty editions of the award from 1965 to 2025.

Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said of Oman (2019) and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh (2020) were both awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize posthumously. Qaboos had died in January 2020; Mujibur Rahman had been assassinated in 1975. The jury met on 19 March 2021 and selected both recipients in one session — the 2019 and 2020 awards were announced together. This was the first time the prize had been given posthumously in its twenty-six-year history.

The Gandhi Peace Prize jury is chaired by the Prime Minister of India. The other members are the Chief Justice of India, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (or the leader of the largest opposition party), the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, and two eminent persons appointed for a three-year term. This is a common exam question because it is unusual for a PM to chair an awards jury — it reflects the prize's status as a high-level national honour with diplomatic significance.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was withheld from 2006 to 2012 inclusive — a period of seven consecutive years. The jury, which has the explicit authority to withhold the award if no nominee meets the required standard, exercised this authority for this entire stretch. The prize resumed in 2013 when it was given to Chandi Prasad Bhatt. Note: the 2004 prize was NOT withheld — it was given to Coretta Scott King of the USA. Some older sources incorrectly list 2004 as withheld.

The 2000 Gandhi Peace Prize was given jointly to Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa who led the post-apartheid democratic transition, and to Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, the microfinance institution founded by Muhammad Yunus. This was the only joint award between recipients from two different countries in the prize's history. It is also the only year where the prize went simultaneously to an individual political leader and to a financial institution.

Gita Press, Gorakhpur — founded in 1923 — received the Gandhi Peace Prize for 2021. The award was announced on 18 June 2023 when the jury, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, met and unanimously decided to recognise Gita Press for its century-long contribution to making religious literature accessible at subsidised prices without relying on advertising. Gita Press has published over 41.7 crore books in 14 languages, including more than 16.21 crore copies of the Bhagavad Gita.

Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Tanzania's first President, was the inaugural recipient of the International Gandhi Peace Prize in 1995. The prize was launched on 2 October 1995, the 125th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Nyerere was recognised for his pan-African leadership, his voluntary relinquishment of power in 1985 after more than two decades as President, and his model of frugal, people-centred governance.

Kiran Bedi received the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service for the reforms she introduced at Tihar Jail in New Delhi during her tenure as Inspector General of Prisons. Tihar housed over 8,000 prisoners and was known for violence and corruption. Bedi introduced literacy classes, yoga and meditation sessions, vocational training, and addiction rehabilitation programmes — transforming a punitive institution into one that attempted rehabilitation. She was also the first woman officer of the Indian Police Service.

From 1958 to 2008, the Ramon Magsaysay Award was given in six specific categories: Government Service, Public Service, Community Leadership, Journalism/Literature/Creative Communication Arts, Peace and International Understanding, and Emergent Leadership. From 2009 onwards, five of these fixed categories were discontinued and the award began to be given without prescribed categories — judges simply look for the best exemplars of the award's spirit. Emergent Leadership, which was added only in 2000 via a Ford Foundation grant and is limited to individuals or organisations aged 40 or under, was retained as a distinct track.

Ramon Magsaysay died on 17 March 1957 in a plane crash. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund proposed the award in April 1957 and the Foundation was formally established in May 1957 with a founding board of seven Filipinos. The first awards were then given on 31 August 1958 — Magsaysay's birth anniversary — after a full selection cycle had been completed. This is why the award is described as "established 1957, first given 1958."

Educate Girls, an NGO focused on enrolling out-of-school girls in rural India, won the 2025 Ramon Magsaysay Award. This made it the first Indian organisation to receive the prize. India has had approximately 60+ individual winners since 1958, but this was the first time an organisation from India received the honour. The NGO was founded in 2007 by Safeena Husain.

Hayao Miyazaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli and the director of celebrated animated films including My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle. He was one of five 2024 Ramon Magsaysay Award recipients, recognised for his use of animation to explore the human condition across four decades of filmmaking.

Vinoba Bhave received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1958 — the very first year the prize was given — for Community Leadership. He was recognised for his work leading the Bhoodan movement, in which he walked across India asking landowners to voluntarily donate a portion of their land to the landless. He was one of five inaugural recipients, alongside winners from Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka.

Midnight's Children won the regular Booker Prize in 1981. In 1993, on the prize's 25th anniversary, a special panel selected it as the Booker of Bookers — the best novel to have won in the first quarter century. In 2008, on the 40th anniversary, a public vote chose it again as the Best of the Booker. It is the only novel to have won both retrospective prizes. A third special award — the Golden Booker (50th anniversary, 2018) — went to The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

The Booker Prize was originally open only to writers from the Commonwealth of Nations, the Republic of Ireland, and Zimbabwe. From 2014 onwards, the prize opened to any work written in English and published in the UK or Ireland, regardless of the author's nationality. This brought in American and other non-Commonwealth authors for the first time and sparked significant debate about whether it would dominate the prize.

The four double Booker winners are J.M. Coetzee (1983 and 1999), Peter Carey (1988 and 2001), Hilary Mantel (2009 and 2012), and Margaret Atwood (2000 and 2019). Ian McEwan has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize six times — among the most nominations ever — but has only won once, for Amsterdam in 1998. He is a very common wrong answer in this type of question.