List of award recipients, showing the year, and language (s) Year Recipient (s) Language (s) Refs. / Notes 1965 (1st) G. Sankara Kurup Malayalam 1966 (2nd) Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay Bengali 1967 (3rd) † Umashankar Joshi Gujarati 1967 (3rd) † Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa ' Kuvempu ' Kannada 1968 (4th) Sumitranandan Pant Hindi 1969 (5th) Firaq Gorakhpuri Urdu 1970 (6th) Viswanatha Satyanarayana Telugu 1971 (7th) Bishnu Dey Bengali 1972 (8th) Ramdhari Singh ' Dinkar ' Hindi 1973 (9th) † D.R. Bendre Kannada 1973 (9th) † Gopinath Mohanty Odia (10th) Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar Marathi (11th) Akilan Tamil 1976 (12th) Ashapoorna Devi Bengali 1977 (13th) K. Shivaram Karanth Kannada 1978 (14th) Sachchidananda Vatsyayan Hindi 1979 (15th) Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya Assamese 1980 (16th) S.K. Pottekkatt Malayalam 1981 (17th) Amrita Pritam Punjabi 1982 (18th) Mahadevi Varma Hindi (19th) Masti Venkatesha Iyengar Kannada 1984 (20th) Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai Malayalam 1985 (21st) Pannalal Patel Gujarati 1986 (22nd) Sachidananda Routray Odia (23rd) Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar ' Kusumagraj ' Marathi (24th) C. Narayana Reddy Telugu (25th) Qurratulain Hyder Urdu (26th) Vinayaka Krishna Gokak Kannada 1991 (27th) Subhash Mukhopadhyay Bengali (28th) Naresh Mehta Hindi (29th) Sitakant Mahapatra Odia (30th) U.R. Ananthamurthy Kannada 1995 (31st) M.T. Vasudevan Nair Malayalam (32nd) Mahasweta Devi Bengali (33rd) Ali Sardar Jafri Urdu 1998 (34th) Girish Karnad Kannada 1999 (35th) † Nirmal Verma Hindi 1999 (35th) † Gurdial Singh Punjabi 2000 (36th) Mamoni Raisom Goswami Assamese (37th) Rajendra Shah Gujarati 2002 (38th) Jayakanthan Tamil 2003 (39th) Vinda Karandikar Marathi (40th) Rehman Rahi Kashmiri 2005 (41st) Kunwar Narayan Hindi 2006 (42nd) † Ravindra Kelekar Konkani 2006 (42nd) † Satya Vrat Shastri Sanskrit 2007 (43rd) O.N.V. Kurup Malayalam 2008 (44th) Akhlaq Mohammed Khan ' Shahryar ' Urdu 2009 (45th) † Amarkant Hindi 2009 (45th) † Sri Lal Sukla Hindi (46th) Chandrashekhara Kambara Kannada 2011 (47th) Pratibha Ray Odia 2012 (48th) Ravuri Bharadhwaja Telugu 2013 (49th) Kedarnath Singh Hindi 2014 (50th) Bhalchandra Nemade Marathi 2015 (51st) Raghuveer Chaudhari Gujarati 2016 (52nd) Shankha Ghosh Bengali 2017 (53rd) Krishna Sobti Hindi
who was the first punjabi novelist to get jnanpith award
Amrita Pritam