PVLF 2026

Interview with Pervin Saket Author of Women in Sports and Women in Science

Author Pervin explores South Asian women in science & sports, weaving stories of courage, quiet defiance, and value-based storytelling for children.
on Aug 28, 2025

Frontlist: You’ve written the “Women in Sports” and now “Women in Science” sets for the Learning TO BE series. What inspired you to spotlight South Asian women in science and sports? What binds these two together beyond their format?

Pervin: These books are, in many ways, an extension of my ongoing preoccupation with women’s stories. Particularly stories that have been buried under the weight of history’s selective memory. For instance, my first novel, Urmila, was a feminist reimagining of a forgotten character, set in contemporary India. I tend to write into silences. Into the gaps where voices should’ve been, but weren’t, either because they were ignored, or deliberately silenced.

So when AdiDev Press invited me to write about Indian women in science and sports, it felt like I was continuing a conversation that had always mattered to me. These are women who didn't just succeed; they succeeded in rooms they weren’t even supposed to enter. That defiance, that quiet audacity, is what binds these two sets together, and what binds them to me!

Frontlist: The protagonists in your stories come from vastly different backgrounds and journeys. Yet, together, they create a unified tapestry of courage. What did you learn about womanhood, grit, and identity while researching and writing their stories?

Pervin: To be honest, I didn’t set out to learn anything about womanhood or grit or identity. Those words come preloaded with a lot of baggage. They tend to show up in panel discussions and NGO brochures, often wearing starched sarees.

What I did notice, again and again, was how these women weren’t trying to be inspirational. They were trying to work, to think, to survive, to move forward, not to make a point, but just to be true to themselves. And often, they did it without speeches or slogans or support.

And while their courage is celebrated today, in the moment that mattered, that courage probably looked very different. Courage can be awkward. Sometimes it’s lonely. Sometimes it’s boring. It may even look like stupidity or stubbornness in the immediacy of that moment. And that, to me, is very reassuring.

So yes, if there’s grit, it’s the kind you find in your shoe: annoying, persistent, painful. And if there’s womanhood, it’s the kind you cobble together while everyone else is busy defining it for you.

Frontlist: Each book in the series has a unique visual style. How did you collaborate with different illustrators, and what role do you think visuals play in storytelling for early readers?

Pervin: Each book really does carry its own visual language, and the credit for that goes entirely to the brilliant illustrators. We didn’t sit across a table and map out every detail; the process was more like a relay race than a duet. I worked on the text first, shaping the rhythm and language. Then the illustrators stepped in for the context, bringing in time and textures.

Since these are short verses, the visual storytelling had to convey history and convention and emotion without spelling things out. You’ll find period details, cues of class or geography, and even hints of personality woven into the illustrations. These choices are subtle but crucial.

Visuals aren't just helpful for early readers; they are foundational. They hold attention, build atmosphere, and offer an entry point into the story. And honestly, this holds true beyond picture books. We live in a world that scrolls, and visual storytelling is now one of the primary ways in which we engage with the world.

Frontlist: Your career spans poetry, novels, editing, and now board books. Has your relationship with language changed while writing for children—has it made you more distilled, more playful, or perhaps more reverent toward simplicity?

Pervin: Of all these forms I have worked in, writing for children is most difficult! I found this particularly true because I was dealing with topics and ideas that were quite complex (discrimination, poverty, patriarchy) and I had to write them in a manner that was accessible and yet honest. To do this, I needed to reach for language which was most rooted rather than ‘simple’. Something that contained all the promise of nuance and yet was free of jargon and embellishment. Something that said more with less, where the child felt spoken to, rather than spoken down to. I love pushing the possibilities of language, and here it was very interesting to balance the tone so that it carries weight but it also carries light.

Frontlist: Do you think value-based storytelling in early childhood can influence the kind of citizens children grow up to become? And if yes, which values do you believe are the most urgent today—beyond the ones covered in the series?

Pervin: I think all storytelling is value-based in the sense that it can shape our desires, wire our instincts and work on our fears. Sometimes this process is overt but often the values are veiled, coming through subliminally. As for which values are most urgent today, I would say authenticity and emotional self-reliance. At a time when we are so deeply immersed in digital worlds, it is very easy to perform the self. To perform for responses, likes and validation. It is going to become increasingly rare to find individuals who are able to keep this chatter out, who can live meaningfully without feeling the need to announce it. All the values in the series are important, but this one about finding your inner compass? This feels urgent.

Frontlist: You’ve chosen verse—a more emotive form. Why did you choose poetry as the vehicle for these powerful, historically grounded stories?

Pervin: Well, poetry was the first form I ever worked in. My first book was a collection of poems, and poetry remains my instinctive choice for exploring complex ideas. At the same time, for this series, I found that rhythm and rhyme offered something that prose couldn’t: a sense of structure within which I could smuggle in discomfort.

Like you know, these stories address themes that aren’t always considered ‘child-friendly’ though children live within those systems every day. Rhyme has a kind of music, a predictability. It creates an illusion of safety. And that illusion is useful. It lets a child walk steadily across terrain that might otherwise feel unstable. That balance mattered to me. I didn’t want to soften the truths. But I did want to offer them in a form that made it possible for children to engage with those ideas. In that sense, rhyme isn’t just a literary device but a formal strategy. It allows difficult concepts to arrive in a form that feels familiar.

Frontlist: Your protagonists span centuries, geographies, disciplines, and social contexts. Yet there’s an invisible thread of quiet defiance in all of them. Was that a theme you discovered while researching—or one you set out to explore?

Pervin: It is a theme that mirrors what I see in myself. We often write versions of ourselves, even when we invent new characters or reimagine historical ones. Such stories may not include our own biographical details, but they have our hungers, our aches, our anxieties. If another writer had worked on the same biographies they would likely have identified a very different thread that stands out: ambition perhaps, or genius. What I kept noticing was how they repeatedly refused to obey the script that was handed down to them. That was the detail that turned their biography into something I could inhabit.