Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora, the largest city in Pakistan's Swat Valley, to Ziauddin Yousafzai, an education activist and school owner, and Toor Pekai Yousafzai. Named after the Pashtun poet and warrior Malalai of Maiwand, she grew up in a lower-middle-class Sunni Pashtun family of the Yusufzai tribe, with two younger brothers, Khushal and Atal. Her father encouraged her education despite cultural norms favoring boys, fostering her early passion for learning amid the Taliban's rising control in Swat, which imposed strict bans on girls' schooling. In 2009, at age 11, as Taliban forces closed schools, Yousafzai gave her first public speech in Peshawar titled 'How Dare the Taliban Take Away My Basic Right to Education?' and began blogging anonymously as 'Gul Makai' for BBC Urdu, detailing life under Taliban rule. Her family fled Swat during military operations against the Taliban but returned in 2009. By 2011, her identity was revealed, drawing threats, yet she continued advocacy. On October 9, 2012, at age 15, a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus in Swat and shot her in the head in an assassination attempt; she survived after airlift to Birmingham, England, for treatment. Relocating there with her family, she resumed education at Edgbaston High School in 2013. On her 16th birthday, July 12, 2013—now 'Malala Day'—she addressed the United Nations, vowing to continue her fight. In 2014, at 17, she co-won the Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi for children's rights. Post-Nobel, Yousafzai graduated from Oxford University in 2020 with a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. She co-founded the Malala Fund to support girls' education globally and authored books including 'I Am Malala' (2013), 'Malala’s Magic Pencil' (2017), and 'We Are Displaced' (2019). She has produced documentaries and advocated on issues like the Chibok schoolgirls' kidnapping in Nigeria.