| 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 |
