Malala Yousafzai was born in Pakistan’s Swat district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on July 12, 1997. Born in a Pashtun family and named after the Aghani heroine Malala of Maiwand, she is an inspiration for many. Malala is a Pakistani activist for female education and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.  She is among the world’s youngest Nobel laureates and the second Pakistani to win the Nobel Prize. 

According to the United Nations website, Malala became “an international symbol for the fight for girls’ education after she was shot in 2012 for opposing Taliban restrictions on female education in her home country of Pakistan.”

Early childhood 

Malala was educated mostly by her father who is a poet, an educational activist, and a school owner. She is fluent in English, Pashto, and Urdu and always aspired to be a doctor when she was a child. Later her father inspired her to become a politician and took her to Peshawar to speak at the local press club. At the age of 11, she gave her first speech at Peshawar, where she asked “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” 

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Malala began blogging under the pseudonym of ‘Gul Makai’ for a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) blog, where she expressed her fears and anxieties about the toll of the ongoing war in Pakistan. She started writing about what life was like under Taliban rule in 2009. 

The murder attempt on Malala 

On October 9, 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot by a Taliban gunman while she was returning home in a school bus. The 15-year-old survived the murder attempt but was wounded. The bullet that hit her travelled 18 inches from the side of her left eye, through her neck and landed on her shoulder. Kainat Riaz and Shazia Ramzan were among the two other girls who were also wounded in the incident. Malala was taken to the United Kingdom for further treatment and she was treated in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. 

Awards and recognition

Malala’s autobiography, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, came out in 2013 and it was co-written with Christina Lamb. The book tells stories about her life in five parts. Malala Yousafzai was designated as a United Nations Messenger of Peace to help raise awareness about the importance of girls’ education in the year 2017. 

She also earned a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford in England. On December 10, 2014, Malala delivered her Nobel Lecture at the young age of 17 years.