When Time magazine named Safeena Husain one of 16 Women of the Year 2026, she was standing outside at a Mumbai philanthropy conference, looking up at a sky so clear she could see the stars. “That almost never happens in Mumbai,” she told me later. “I felt so inspired.”. Safeena Husain. Making the impossible visible has been Safeena’s life’s work. For two decades, she has searched for the girls in India’s most forgotten villages, the ones with names like Maafi (forgive me for having a girl) and Missed Call (we asked God for a boy, but he missed the call).. I had known I would love Safeena Husain before I even met her.. As a mother of three girls — engineers, athletes, dreamers — I’ve felt deep gratitude to the women who made those futures possible. And Safeena Husain, founder of Educate Girls, is up there with the fighters.. We meet early this year at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Sitting across from me, Safeena looks elegant in a teal blue silk sari and long navy coat. She smiled when she saw me holding Every Last Girl, the book she is there to launch.. The book is full of heartbreaking stories. But it also offers hope, with many strategies to get girls into school. One innovative approach stages village plays dramatizing the life-and-death effects of illiteracy.. Safeena speaks with intensity and clarity. We talk about her childhood reading, the process of writing her book, and the impact of winning the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.. Safeena, are you a reader?. My parents divorced when I was young. My mother remarried, and my stepfather was an alcoholic. We lived in a one-room janta flat in Delhi. I was always in my own world, a girl with her nose in a book.. There used to be a mobile library outside Naoroji Nagar in Delhi that would come to our neighborhood, and I read a lot of books from there.. I read books with all sorts of titles, like Yahan Ka Vyapari, which I later realized was a translation of The Merchant of Venice. I read a lot of stuff, but I read it all in Hindi.. In Saket there was a sabzi mandi, and there was this place that rented comic books cheaply, and I read all those comic book digests—anything I could get my hands on.. You went from Hindi comic books to Nobel prize-winning Korean author Han Kang — how did that journey happen?. I shifted to reading in English, which was hard at first. I began with simpler books, like the Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew series. In high school, I moved to Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw, etc.. Now I’m discovering many female writers—books like The Vegetarian (Han Kang) and Butter (by Asako Yuzuki) . There’s incredible writing out there, like Bunny (Mona Awad), wildly imaginative, and Sally Rooney. I love these young women with fresh voices.. And now you are the author of a book? What prompted this decision to write?. I was in Oxford giving a talk when the moderator later told me, “So much has been written about you—I’ve