Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai (, ملاله یوسفزۍ, pronunciation: ; born 12 July 1997) is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17.

She is the world's youngest Nobel Prize laureate, the second Pakistani and the first Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize.

Yousafzai is a human rights advocate for the education of women and children in her native homeland, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school.

Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan's "most prominent citizen."

The daughter of education activist Ziauddin Yousafzai, she was born to a Yusufzai Pashtun family in Swat and was named after the Afghan folk heroine Malalai of Maiwand.

Considering Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Barack Obama, and Benazir Bhutto as her role models, she was also inspired by her father's thoughts and humanitarian work.

Yousafzai was born on 12 July 1997 in the Swat District of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, into a lower-middle-class family.

She is the daughter of Ziauddin Yousafzai and Toor Pekai Yousafzai.

Her family is Sunni Muslim of Pashtun ethnicity, belonging to the Yusufzai tribe.

The family did not have enough money for a hospital birth and Yousafzai was born at home with the help of neighbours.

She was given her first name Malala (meaning "grief-stricken") after Malalai of Maiwand, a famous Pashtun poet and warrior woman from southern Afghanistan.

At her house in Mingora, she lived with her two younger brothers, Khushal and Atal, her parents, Ziauddin and Tor Pekai, and two chickens.

Fluent in Pashto, Urdu and English, Yousafzai was educated mostly by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a poet, school owner, and an educational activist himself, running a chain of private schools known as the Khushal Public School.

In an interview, she once said that she aspired to become a doctor, though later her father encouraged her to become a politician instead.

Ziauddin referred to his daughter as something entirely special, allowing her to stay up at night and talk about politics after her two brothers had been sent to bed.

Inspired by the twice-elected, assassinated Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Yousafzai started speaking about education rights as early as September 2008, when her father took her to Peshawar to speak at the local press club.

"How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?"

In early 2009, when she was 11, she wrote a blog under her pseudonym Gul Makai for the BBC Urdu to detail her life during the Taliban's occupation of Swat.

The following summer, journalist Adam B. Ellick made a New York Times documentary about her life as the Pakistan Armed Forces launched Operation Rah-e-Rast against the militants in Swat.

In 2011, she received Pakistan's first National Youth Peace Prize.

She rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize by activist Desmond Tutu.

On 9 October 2012, while on a bus in Swat District after taking an exam, Yousafzai and two other girls were shot by a Taliban gunman in an assassination attempt targeting her for her activism; the gunman fled the scene.

She was struck in the head by a bullet and remained unconscious and in critical condition at the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology, but her condition later improved enough for her to be transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, UK.

The attempt on her life sparked an international outpouring of support.

Deutsche Welle reported in January 2013 that she may have become "the most famous teenager in the world".

Weeks after the attempted murder, a group of 50 leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her.

Governments, human rights organizations and feminist groups subsequently condemned the Pakistani Taliban.

In response, the Taliban further denounced Yousafzai, indicating plans for a possible second assassination attempt which the Taliban felt was justified as a religious obligation.

This sparked another international outcry.

After her recovery, Yousafzai became a more prominent activist for the right to education.

Based in Birmingham, she co-founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit organisation, with Shiza Shahid.

In 2013, she co-authored I Am Malala, an international best seller.

In 2013, she received the Sakharov Prize, and in 2014, she was the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi of India.

Aged 17 at the time, she was the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.

The 2013, 2014 and 2015 issues of Time magazine featured her as one of the most influential people globally.

Yousafzai completed her secondary school education at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham in England from 2013 to 2017.

In 2015, she was the subject of the Oscar-shortlisted documentary He Named Me Malala.

In 2017 she was awarded honorary Canadian citizenship and became the youngest person to address the House of Commons of Canada.

From there she won a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and undertook three years of study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), graduating in 2020.

She returned in 2023 to become the youngest ever Honorary Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.