The Jnanpith Award is conferred by Bharatiya Jnanpith, a literary and research organization founded in 1944 by Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain and and his wife Rama Jain. The award was instituted in 1961 but first awarded in 1965. The award consists of a citation plaque, a cash prize and a bronze replica of Saraswati. The award is open only for Indian citizens.
| 1. | First Person to win the award | G. Sankara Kurup | 1965 |
| 2. | First woman to win the award | Ashapurna Devi | 1976 |
| # | Language | Author | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Malayalam | G. Sankara Kurup | 1965 |
| 2. | Bengali | Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay | 1966 |
| 3. | Gujarati | Umashankar Joshi | 1967 |
| 4. | Kannada | K. Venkatappa Puttappa (Kuvempu) | 1967 |
| 5. | Hindi | Sumitranandan Pant | 1968 |
| 6. | Urdu | Firaq Gorakhpuri | 1969 |
| 7. | Telugu | Vishwanatha Satyanarayana | 1970 |
| 8. | Odia | Gopinath Mohanty | 1973 |
| 9. | Marathi | Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar | 1974 |
| 10. | Tamil | Akilan | 1975 |
| 11. | Assamese | Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya | 1979 |
| 12. | Punjabi | Amrita Pritam | 1981 |
| 13. | Kashmiri | Rehman Rahi | 2004 |
| 14. | Konkani | Ravindra Kelekar | 2006 |
| 15. | Sanskrit | Satya Vrat Shastri | 2006 |
| 16. | English | Amitav Ghosh | 2018 |
