Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani campaigner for girls' education who, as a schoolgirl in the Swat valley, wrote about life under the Pakistani Taliban and spoke out against their ban on girls' schooling. In October 2012 a Taliban gunman shot her in the head. She survived, settled in England, and in 2014, aged 17, shared the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the youngest Nobel laureate in history.

She was born in the Swat District of north-western Pakistan on 12 July 1997, in what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, into a Sunni Pashtun family of modest means. She was named after Malalai of Maiwand, a heroine of Afghan folk tradition. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, was a poet and campaigner who ran a group of private schools, and she grew up in the town of Mingora, largely taught by him. She later named Benazir Bhutto, the Pashtun nonviolent leader Bacha Khan and Barack Obama among her role models.

By late 2008 the valley was falling to Pakistani Taliban militants under Maulana Fazlullah. They banned television and music, restricted women's movements and blew up more than 100 girls' schools. In September 2008, aged eleven, she gave a speech on the right to education at the press club in Peshawar.

Seeking to show ordinary life under the militants, BBC Urdu asked her father to find a pupil willing to keep an anonymous diary. When another girl's family refused, he proposed his own daughter. Writing as "Gul Makai", she described her fears as the Taliban ordered all girls out of school from 15 January 2009, the empty streets of Mingora and the brief reopening of girls' classes after a peace deal. The diary ended in March 2009.

That May the Pakistani army launched an offensive to retake Swat, and her family was among those who fled, returning in July. A New York Times documentary filmed during this period, followed by television and newspaper interviews, made her known across the country, and her identity as the blogger became public by the end of 2009. In 2011 she became the first recipient of Pakistan's National Youth Peace Prize.

As her fame grew, so did threats against her. On 9 October 2012 a gunman shot her on the bus taking her home from an exam; two other girls were also wounded. The bullet struck near her left eye and passed into her shoulder. After emergency surgery in Peshawar and treatment in Rawalpindi, she was flown on 15 October to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, where surgeons later rebuilt part of her skull and fitted a cochlear implant.

The attack provoked protests in Pakistan and condemnation worldwide. A group of Pakistani clerics issued a fatwa against the attackers, while the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility and threatened to try again. The investigation was troubled: of ten men later convicted, it emerged that eight had in fact been acquitted, and others involved are believed to have escaped to Afghanistan.

Her family stayed in Birmingham, where she attended Edgbaston High School from 2013 to 2017. She co-founded the Malala Fund to support girls' schooling, and on her 16th birthday in July 2013 addressed the United Nations, an occasion the UN called "Malala Day". Her memoir I Am Malala appeared that year. In October 2014 she was named joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with the Indian children's rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi, making her the second Pakistani Nobel laureate, after the physicist Abdus Salam.

She went on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating in 2020. Her campaigns have included a school for Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon, opened on her 18th birthday with the slogan "books, not bullets", and criticism of the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. After the fall of Kabul in August 2021 she spoke out against the new Taliban government's exclusion of girls from schooling beyond the primary years in Afghanistan.

Our 2000 and 2010 maps show Pakistan and Afghanistan in the years of the Taliban insurgency that shaped her childhood in Swat.