Thinkers Timeline

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani education activist. She is the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was born on 12 July 1997 in Mingora, a city in the Swat Valley of northwestern Pakistan. Her family is Sunni Muslim and Pashtun. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, is a poet and teacher who ran a chain of private schools. He believed his daughter should have the same education as his sons. He named her after Malalai of Maiwand, a Pashtun folk heroine who fought against the British Army in 1880. Malala's childhood was peaceful until 2007. In that year, a group called the Pakistani Taliban took control of the Swat Valley. They banned girls from going to school, destroyed over 100 schools, and killed people who disagreed with them. Malala was 10. Her father kept his schools open in secret. In 2009, aged 11, she began writing an anonymous diary for the BBC under the name 'Gul Makai'. She described daily life under Taliban rule: the fear, the empty classrooms, the limits on women going outside. Her diary was read around the world. After the Pakistani army pushed the Taliban out of Swat, Malala continued speaking publicly for girls' education. She became famous in Pakistan. On 9 October 2012, when she was 15, Taliban gunmen stopped her school bus. A man climbed on, asked for her by name, and shot her in the head. She was flown to Birmingham in the United Kingdom for emergency treatment. She nearly died. Her recovery took months. She stayed in the UK with her family. In 2013, she co-wrote a bestselling memoir, I Am Malala. In 2014, at age 17, she won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University from 2017 to 2020. She founded the Malala Fund to support girls' education worldwide. In 2021, she married Asser Malik. She continues to work and write in 2026.