In 2015, Bay Area journalist Jaya Padmanabhan took a trip to India to investigate the local literacy movement. Her topic of interest: Kerala, a state in Southern India with the highest literacy rate in the country and a rich Communist history. Padmanabhan pored over documents in libraries, discovering that Kerala’s socialist movement, which began in the 1930s, allowed for the advancement of women’s literacy and a better life for workers. Six years later, her unpublished manuscript inspired by her research and travels has won an international Page Turner Writing Award.
