- 2011: Honorary Fellow, Department of Culture, Government of South Korea(2011-2013)
- 2007: Won the Hutch Crossword Book Award, known as ‘The Indian Booker Prize,’ for the translation of the Malayalam novel Kesavante Vilaapangal -1999) (Kesavan’s Lamentations by the celebrated Malayalam novelist M.Mukundan, critically analyzing Kerala’s society with regard to the mass appeal of the legendary Marxist leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad. The novel has created and sustained a lot of interest, with 16 editions during the last nine years. The translation, Kesavan’s Lamentations was published by Rupa & Co(2006).
- 2004: Drafted to a Panel of Translators for lifelong tenure at the national level suo motu by the Executive Board of Sahitya Akademi.
- 2000–2002: Senior Fellowship of Department of Culture, Government of India,for a research project on The Local Narrative Traditions of Kerala.
- 1996: Association of Kerala Medical Graduates in America (AKMG) prize, for my translation of eminent Malayalam writer Sethu’s short story, “Doothu”(The Mission). Sethu is a senior writer noted for his preoccupation with the inner life of human individuals; he is the most important proponent of psychological realism in Malayalam fiction. The Prize included a cash award of Rs.10,000/- and a trip to the United States to participate in the Annual Convention of The Associated Writing Programs in Washington D.C. and to attend an International Workshop in Creative Writing at the Writers’ Center, Bethesda, Maryland.
- 1993: Katha Award for Translation For my English translation of Paul Zacharia’s Malayalam short story ‘Salaam America’, which was later published in Katha Prize Stories 3. Ed. Geeta Dharmarajan (NewDelhi: Katha – Rupa, 1993). The story is set in New York and involves an expatriate Malayalee youth who, after arriving the US marrying a nurse, is cut off from the mainstream life because of his inadequacies in communicating in the English language. He gets into an extra-marital relationship with a housemaid, and his wife throws him out. This story was the topic of hot debate in the expatriate Malayalee community in the US for a long time, a decade ago.