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Matthew Champion
Oct 10, 2014
Malala Yousafzai has been jointly awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi.
The Nobel Committee praised "their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education".
In awarding them the peace prize, the committee said it "regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism".
Malala becomes a Nobel laureate almost two years to the day after a masked member of the Taliban boarded her school bus, asked for her by name and shot her in the head.
Miraculously, Malala survived the initial attack but was in a critical condition, and amid a global outpouring of sympathy for her plight and revulsion for the assassinated attempt, she was flown to Birmingham in the UK to be treated at a specialist military hospital.
Malala, whose father Ziauddin Yousafzai is an educational advocate who set up his own school in the Swat Valley where they lived, came to prominence when she was revealed as the writer behind an anonymous blog about education in Pakistan on the BBC website.
Her blog coincided with the Taliban occupation of Swat, where they banned TV and music and stopped women from shopping and going to school.
In her blog she revealed herself to be absolutely fearless. In one of many interviews before the assassination attempt, she said: “I don’t mind if I have to sit on the floor at school. All I want is education. And I’m afraid of no one.”
In 2011 she received the first National Youth Peace Prize for advocating education for girls and speaking out against the Taliban, whose leaders met the following year and voted to kill her.
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