Sayeed, also founder and head of Biswa Shahityo Kendro or World Literature Centre, has been picked for the award for "his cultivating in the youth of Bangladesh a love for literature and its humanizing values through exposure to the great books of Bengal and the world", says the board of trustees in the citation.

Seven individuals from the Philippines, China, Thailand, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan will receive Asia's most prestigious prize, also known as Asian Nobel Prize.

The seven 2004 Magsaysay awardees join 236 other laureates who have received Asia's highest honour to date. The award will be formally conferred on them during the presentation ceremonies to be held on August 31, 2004 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Tahrunnesa Abdullah, Fazle Hasan Abed, Zafrullah Chowdhury, Angela Gomes, Father Richard William Timm, Mohammad Yeasin and Muhammad Yunus are the Bangladeshis to have received the coveted award earlier for their contributions in respective fields.

Sayeed was born in 1939 in Calcutta, where his father was a teacher and a well-known playwright. After partition, he attended university in East Pakistan. As a young man, Sayeed wrote poetry and fiction and led a vibrant literary movement of the 1960s.

As editor of the magazine Kanthashar; he drifted into the new medium of television and hosted a succession of popular shows. All the while, for some 25 years, he taught literature at Dhaka College.

Observing the decline of intellectual life in Bangladeshi society, Sayeed founded the Kendro in 1978 to restore interest in reading among the youth and to "enlighten human beings," in his own words. Under Sayeed's tutelage, 25 university students began reading and discussing great works of literature in an Enrichment Program that soon grew to include high school and college students.

Currently, the Kendro has 500 branches in 54 districts and the programme has hundreds of thousands of graduates. Its well-stocked bookmobiles today make stops at 250 locations in four cities across the country.

Sayeed developed the Kendro itself as a library, serving hundreds of readers a day and also as a publishing house. Sales of its 225 volumes of verse and prose and translations provide financial support for the Kendro's activities.

Responding to the woeful lack of public lending libraries in Bangladesh, Sayeed launched a nationwide library programme in 1998. Versatile and charismatic, Sayeed devotes himself to the Kendro and its programmes and also to urgent environmental concerns.

Sayeed dreams of a new generation of enlightened Bangladeshi citizens whose values have been enriched by reading.