India, Oct. 8 -- Teacher Mubashir Ahmad Shah (48), who writes under the pen name Izhar Mubashir, won the Sahitya Akademi Bal Sahitya Puraskar for children's literature this year. The award, which comes with a copper plaque and a cash prize of Rs.50,000, was conferred on Shah for his children's book Shure Te Tchure Gyush (Children and their Chirping), a collection of 13 short stories written in Kashmiri.

"The award is not just mine," says Shah, who runs a private primary school in Waghama village in south Kashmir's Bijbehara district. "It belongs to every Kashmiri child who deserves to see their world, their language, and their emotions reflected in a book."

Although he has been writing poetry in Urdu and English since the late 1990s, Sh...