Wikipedia:Today's featured list/February 7, 2020
The Pampa Award is a literary award in the Indian state of Karnataka. The award was established in 1987 by the government of Karnataka. It is the highest literary honor conferred by the Department of Kannada and Culture of the Karnataka state government, and recognises works written in the Kannada language. The award is named after the first Kannada poet, Adikavi Pampa. The award originally comprised a cash prize of ₹1 lakh (US$1,300), a shawl, a citation and a memento. The cash prize was increased to ₹3 lakh (US$3,800) in 2008. Prior to 1996, the awards were given for a best single work by a Kannada writer. Since then, the award has been given to writers for their lifetime contributions to Kannada literature. Since its inception in 1987, the award has been given to a total of 31 individuals. Kuvempu (pictured), the first recipient of the award, was honored for his work Sri Ramayana Darshanam (1949), a modern rendition of the Indian epic Ramayana. In 2015, Chandrashekhar Patil returned his award as a sign of protest against the assassination of the scholar M. M. Kalburgi. The most recent recipient is K. S. Nissar Ahmed, who was awarded in 2017. (Full list...)