Malala wins the Nobel Peace Prize

The story

The school in Mingora

Malala Yousafzai was born on 12 July 1997 in Mingora, the main town of the Swat Valley, a beautiful region of mountains and lakes in northern Pakistan. Her father, Ziauddin, was a teacher and ran a small private school. For him, and for her, learning to read and write was a joy, and girls had the same right to study as boys. Malala was clever, curious and liked to talk: even as a little girl she gave speeches to her classmates.

When she was ten, the valley changed. The Pakistani Taliban, a group inspired by a very strict interpretation of Islam, took control of many villages in Swat. They banned music, television and dancing, and imposed very harsh rules on women. Above all, they said that girls could no longer go to school. In 2008 the Taliban announced that all girls' schools would be closed in January 2009. In those months hundreds of schools were destroyed with bombs.

The diary of “Gul Makai”

At that point Malala, who was only 11, decided to tell what was happening. A BBC journalist was looking for a schoolgirl to write a diary about life under the Taliban. To be safe, she used a made-up name, “Gul Makai”, which means “cornflower”. In the diary she described the fear of going to school, the banned music, the sound of gunshots at night, and said that she hid her books under her shawl. Then, when the Pakistani army took back control of the valley in 2009, she and her father began to speak openly, on television and in the newspapers, in favour of education for girls.

9 October 2012

This courage was dangerous. On 9 October 2012 Malala was 15. She was on her way home from school on a minibus when an armed man climbed on board and asked who Malala was: then he shot her in the head. Two of her friends, Shazia and Kainat, were wounded. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they would kill her again if she survived.

She was flown by helicopter to a military hospital and then, in a coma, to England, to the hospital in Birmingham, where she was operated on several times. A whole country and many people around the world followed her condition anxiously. Malala recovered: part of her skull was rebuilt, and after a few weeks she could speak again. She stayed in England with her family, because in Pakistan she was no longer safe, and started studying again.

“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen”

On 12 July 2013, her sixteenth birthday, Malala spoke at the United Nations in New York. She said she felt no hatred for the man who had shot her and added: “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world”. With her father she founded an organisation, the Malala Fund, to support girls' education around the world, and she wrote a book, “I Am Malala”, which was translated into many languages.

On 10 December 2014, aged 17, she received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo together with the Indian Kailash Satyarthi, who has for years fought against child labour: she is the youngest person ever to have received this prize. Then she went on studying, and graduated from the University of Oxford in 2020.

Her commitment continued after the prize: she has visited schools and refugee camps in many countries, met girls who could not study, and asked heads of government to invest more in education. In 2017 the United Nations named her a “Messenger of Peace”, the youngest person ever to receive this role.