Meet the South Asia Book Award Winners: Mitali Perkins

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs 

South Asia Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature presents

Join us to celebrate the 2020 South Asia Book Award winners! Through a series of virtual discussions, we will get to know these authors, their award-winning titles, and how these books can be used to learn about and teach about South Asia in our schools, libraries, and homes. 

This discussion features Mitali Bose Perkins, who won the 2020 SABA Award for her book You Bring the Distant Near (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019). This book tells the story of Robin, Kat and Gracie who travel to Kolkata, India with their church group to help girls who have been rescued from trafficking but find that they are the ones whose lives are changed. 

Mitali Perkins has written many books for young readers, all of which explore crossing different kinds of borders. Mitali's fiction explores poverty, immigration, child soldiers, microcredit, and human trafficking, thanks to living overseas for many years and studying Political Science at Stanford and Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley. Her goal is to make readers laugh or cry, preferably both, as long as their hearts are widening. She lives and writes in the East Bay.

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