Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai (born 12 July 1997) is a Pakistani girls'-education activist and film and television producer, and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, receiving the Peace Prize in 2014 at the age of seventeen. Her worldwide fame began when, as a child in the Swat Valley, she wrote a diary under a pseudonym for BBC Urdu; a Taliban assassination attempt in 2012 — she was shot on a school bus — made her a global face of the right of girls to education. She co-founded the Malala Fund, and her voice has reached the United Nations and platforms around the world. ^{1 2}

Malala was born in Mingora, in the Swat District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northwestern Pakistan, into a lower-middle-class Sunni Muslim Pashtun family, and was named after Malalai of Maiwand, the famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, is an education activist and school owner; she counted her father, Bacha Khan, Benazir Bhutto and Barack Obama among her role models. ^{1 2}

She completed her secondary education at Edgbaston High School in Birmingham, England (2013–2017), then read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating in 2020; in 2023 she became the youngest ever Honorary Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford. ¹

In early 2009, aged eleven, Malala began writing a blog under the pseudonym Gul Makai for BBC Urdu, detailing her life during the Taliban's occupation of Swat, where the movement had at times banned girls from attending school. The following summer, journalist Adam B. Ellick made a New York Times documentary about her life as the Pakistani armed forces fought the militants in Swat. She rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, received Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize in 2011, and was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by Desmond Tutu. ¹

On 9 October 2012 a Taliban gunman shot Malala on a bus in Swat District after she had taken an exam; she was struck in the head and two other girls were also shot. She was treated in critical condition at the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology and then transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, UK. The attempt sparked an international outpouring of support: Deutsche Welle reported in January 2013 that she may have become "the most famous teenager in the world", and fifty leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwa against those who had tried to kill her, while the Taliban denounced her and indicated plans for a possible second attempt. ¹

After her recovery, Malala became a more prominent activist for the right to education. With Shiza Shahid she co-founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit supporting girls' education, whose projects include a school in Lebanon for Syrian refugee girls. On 12 July 2013, her sixteenth birthday, she addressed the United Nations to call for worldwide access to education. ¹

She co-authored "I Am Malala" (2013), an international bestseller. She moved into screen production as a producer of film and television, with a programming deal for Apple TV+; the documentary about her life, "He Named Me Malala" (2015), was Oscar-shortlisted. ¹

Malala received the Sakharov Prize in 2013 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, jointly with Kailash Satyarthi of India — the youngest Nobel laureate ever, the second Pakistani and the only Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Time magazine featured her among the world's most influential people in 2013, 2014 and 2015; in 2017 she was awarded honorary Canadian citizenship and became the youngest person to address the House of Commons of Canada. ¹

This section presents differing views as reported in the sources; it is not the museum's verdict. Malala is a living figure, so the museum confines itself to description and attribution.

Her supporters include governments, human rights organisations and feminist groups worldwide; former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi called her Pakistan's "most prominent citizen", and leading clerics of her own country issued a fatwa against her attempted killers. ¹

Her critics at home included a book that accused her of attacking the Pakistan Armed Forces under the pretence of female education and described her father as a "double agent" — accusations the article presents as their authors' positions. The Taliban condemned her activism and threatened to target her again. ¹

She co-authored "I Am Malala" (2013), her memoir of childhood in Swat, the assassination attempt and her campaign for girls' education, translated into many languages and an international bestseller. ¹

Malala has been based in Birmingham since her treatment there in 2012, and continued her education and work from there. The museum publishes no family detail beyond what understanding her public work needs. ¹

Malala turned a child's local campaign to defend her school into an international movement for girls' education: her fund finances schools and programmes in several countries, and her book, speeches and the films about her have reached millions of readers and viewers; her birthday, 12 July, became known at the United Nations as "Malala Day". ¹

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
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