Award-winning writer Namita Gokhale has been selected for the seventh Yamin Hazarika Woman of Substance Award for the year 2021.
The award is instituted by a collective of women professionals in memory of Northeast’s first woman to join the Central Police Service, Yamin Hazarika who was DCP Delhi Police.
The award recognizes and celebrates women who have made a notable contribution to the greater good of society.
Namita Gokhale is a co-founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival and has written twenty books, including eleven works of fiction.
Her recent novel, ‘Jaipur Journals’, was released in 2020. Betrayed By Hope, a play on the tragic life of the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, was also published last year.
A new novel, ‘The Blind Matriarch’, will be out in late September 2021.
She has also been one of the founder- directors of the Mountain Echoes, The Bhutan Literature Festival from 2009 to 2019 , and mentors Himalayan Echoes, the Kumaon Festival of Literature and the Arts.
She has been conferred various prizes, including the prestigious First Centenary National Award for Literature by the Asam Sahitya Sabha in 2017.
“It is an honour and privilege to be nominated for the Yamin Hazarika Woman of Substance Award 2021. The late Yamin Hazarika was an outstanding and exceptional human being, who continues to inspire us today by the integrity, commitment and dedication which she displayed in such abundant measure in her short life,” Gokhale said in a statement.
Yamin Hazarika, who hailed from Assam, was the first woman from Northeast to be selected for the NCT of Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Island, Lakshawadeep, Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli Police service (DANIPS), a federal police service in India, administering Delhi and the Union Territories in 1977.
Hazarika succumbed to cancer in the year 1999, but her great trail of legacy lives even today inspiring millions, especially women in the law enforcement sector.