Eminent Malayalam poet O. N.V. Kurup has been chosen for the Jnanpith Award for the year 2007, and noted Urdu poet Akhlaq Khan Shahryar for 2008 for their contribution to literature.The recipients for the country's highest-literary honour were announced in New Delhi after a meeting of Jnanpith Selection Board.Kurup, who was in Dubai to attend a function told AIR correspondent he had come to sing people’s sorrow, people’s agony, ecstasies and anxieties.Born in 1936 in a Muslim Rajput family in Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly district, Shahryar shaped himself as an intellectual poet, whose poetry strongly expresses an “ideological non-commitment”.