Film director and novelist Ved Rahi will be given the prestigious ‘Kusumagraj’ national award for literature. In a release, the university said that Rahi would be handed over the award at a function to be held at the YCMOU soon.
Instituted by the city-based Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University (YCMOU), the Kusumagraj Rashtriya Sahitya Puraskar carries a cash prize of Rs one lakh, a memento, and a citation.
The award is founded after Jnanpith-laureate Marathi poet and playwright late VV Shirwadkar, popularly known as ‘Kusumagraj’.
Rahi was born on 22 May 1933 and he hails from Jammu. He has been honored by Sahitya Akademi award for his Dogri novel, ‘Aale’ in 1983.
Ved started writing in Urdu and later turned to Dogri and Hindi also. He has written 7 published novels, 3 collections of short stories and 2 anthologies of poetry in Dogri language. He has also published several novels, short story collections and anthologies of poetry in Hindi and Urdu.
He has written stories, film-scripts, dialogues for 25 Hindi feature films and directed 5 films., one of them was 2001 released ‘Veer Savarkar’, a biopic on the life of revolutionary Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.