Nine books of short stories, four of poetry, two of essays, one science fiction and eight writers for their contribution towards literature for children have been honoured with the Bal Sahitya Puraskar this year.

While Ruskin Bond has been honoured for his contribution to children’s literature in English, Bala Showri Reddy has been honoured for the same in Hindi, Santanoo Tamuly in Asamese, Palakala Sitaram Bhatia in Kannada, K Sreekumar in Malayalam, Ram Prasad Mohanty in Oriya and Manmohan Singh Daun in Punjabi.

The winners’ list for essays featured names like Harichanran Bodo for his work in Bodo, Okhrangma Isingao, and Deendayal Sharma for his Rajasthani essay Baalpan Ri Baatan. The award winning short stories included Bhaluker Dolna, written by Balaram Basak in Bengali, Aav haya, varta kahu written in Gujarati by Yoseph Macwan, Pilpilha Gachha, written by Muralidhar Jha in Maithili and more.

The jury consisted of three renowned literary figures in each language, including Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Malayalam, Maithili, Konkani, Kashmiri, Kannada, Hindi, Gujarati, English, Dogri, Bodo, Bengali and Assamese.