Manoj Barpujari won Swarna Kamal for the best film critic at the 59th National Film Awards 2011. He was also adjudged best film critic at the Assam State Film Awards of 2015 and the Prag Cine Awards 2016. He has 12 books to his credit including Anweshan aru Anubhav (1999), which is a collection of articles on cinema in Assamese and Jyotiprasador pora Jahnu-Jwngdao aru onanyo (2016), a book on eight decades of cinema of Assam. He has co-edited Perspectives on Cinema of Assam (2007), a Gauhati Cine Club publication, the first comprehensive volume on the subject in English. He has written a chapter on Assamese cinema in the Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas (2013, London). His write-ups on cinema has been published in Frontline (Chennai), Deep Focus (Bengaluru), Indian Film Culture (Kolkata), One India One People (Mumbai), and web megazines like e-cineindia and Silhouette, as well as the leading newspapers and journals of Assam, besides several publications of international film festivals. He is a member of FIPRESCI (the Paris based international federation of film critics), member of FCCI (Film Critics Circle of India) and founder trustee of the Mumbai based IFCA (Indian Film Critics Association). He had served as juror in some major international film festivals both in and out of the country, mainly at Busan, Port of Spain, Almaty, Dhaka, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Thiruvanathapuram, Siliguri etc. He is a member of the international board of SHOFF film festival of South Korea and Busan International Animal Rights Film Festival since 2019. He was also a jury member at the Prag Cine Awards of 2005 & 2011, Adda Short Film Festival of 2009, 2012 & 2017, Assam State Film Awards 2013 & 2018, and National Film Awards 2015. He presented documentaries from Assam at a program organized at the Media and Communications Department, Goldsmiths College, London in 2008. He has conducted an international workshop on the art of film criticism at the University of West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad in 2012. He attended the Times BFI London Film Festival twice as a critic-journalist in 2005 and 2008. He has scripted and produced numerous programmes, radio features, serials and documentaries for the Guwahati centres of Akashbani (All India Radio) and Doordarshan since early 1980s. He assisted national award-winning director Gautam Bora in the critically acclaimed Poet of the Crossroads, a documentary film on poet Navakanta Barua produced by Sahitya Akademi in 2000. As director and editor he has a popular current affairs serial Sampratik to his credit which was telecast by Doordarshan Guwahati in 2004. He was a member of the governing body of the Jyoti Chitraban Film Studio Society. He has been associated with the film society movement since 1990 and played pivotal roles in forming and co-founding different film societies along the Brahmaputra valley. A historical evaluation of the film society movement in Assam written by Barpujari is included in The Film Society Movement in India, an Asian Film Foundation (Mumbai) publication edited by H. N. Narahari Rao. He presented papers on cinema in various national seminars and gave talks on the art of film criticism, aesthetics of cinema and its social contributions at Dibrugarh University (2012), Central University, Tezpur (2012), Assam Women University (2019), Cotton University (2019), J. B. College, Jorhat (2019), Sonapur College (2018), Bibekananda Kendra Cultural Centre, Nagaon (2018), Gauhati Cine Club (2007), Bhupen Hazarika Centre of Mass-communication and Journalism, Cotton College (2012-2015), Dr. Bhupen Hazarika Regional Government Film and Television Institute (2016), Academic Staff College, HRD Centre, Gauhati University (2014 & 2018), Gauhati Artists Guild (2018), etc. He left active journalism in 2015 as an Associate Editor of a popular Assamese daily newspaper. He took part at the Bangladesh-India Dialogue of Young Leaders held in Dhaka in 2006 and represented Assam at the All India Editors Conference held in Srinagar in 2009. He has a long 35 years of experience in journalism based in Guwahati and received an international journalism fellowship of Trinidad & Tobago in 2010 after which he published a well-received travelogue titled Touching the Trinity (2012). He also wrote Trinidador Dinlipi that was conferred with the Hem Baruah Memorial Award for best travelogue by Asam Sahitya Sabha in 2017. Barpujari has won the Munin Borkotoky Literary Award in 2003 for his collection of poems Amlakhi Gasar Suhuri. He has been publishing poetry since 1980. Many of his poems are translated to several major Indian languages and included in various anthologies of Indian poems and in journals like Samakaleen Sahitya and Indian Literature and Sahitya Akademi.
