Joy Goswami and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay to receive prestigious award

The creme de la creme of Kolkata will make their way to Raj Bhavan on March 21 to attend the Sunil Gangopadhyay Memorial Award ceremony. The prestigious award is given to eminent litterateurs, and this year poet Joy Goswami and author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay will be receiving the honour.
The Sunil Gangopadhyay Memorial Award is hosted by The Bengal, a city-based NGO, which is represented by prominent individuals of the state from different walks of life.The Governor of West Bengal Keshari Nath Tripathi along with Nabaneeta Dev Sen, president of the NGO and HM Bangur, chairman of the NGO, will confer the award to Mukhopadhyay for the year 2014-2015 and Goswami for the year 2015-2016. The award includes a citation and a cash award of `2 lakh, instituted by the NGO in honour of their former president, the late poet-novelist, Sunil Gangopadhyay.
The first award for the year 2012-13 and 2013-14 was conferred to two eminent poets Nirendranath Chakraborty and Sankha Ghosh respectively by the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee.

Singer Iman Chakraborty will be singing the opening song for the event and actor-director Arindam Sil who is also a Committee member of The Bengal and joint convenor of Pronam Project (an initiative of The Bengal in collaboration with the Kolkata Police for the senior citizens) will recite a poem written by the late Sunil Gangopadhyay, to mark the occasion. Fashion designer Agnimitra Paul, who is also a committee member of the NGO
and joint convenor of Pronam Project, will moderate the
function.

The gala award ceremony is expected to be attended by various government officials, diplomats, celebrities and people from the art and literature fraternity. Team members of The Bengal, Goutam Ghose, Usha Uthup, Dona Ganguly, June, Bickram Ghosh and Aniruddha Roy Chowdhary, among others, will be present at the function.