Terry Gross
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
As remarkable as it is that my guest Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was 17, there are remarkable ways she's been living her life since then.
Let's start with the famous part of her story.
She was born in 1997 and grew up in a remote region of Pakistan's Swat Valley near the Afghanistan border.
In 2008, after the Taliban invaded her town, terrorizing the people, they banned girls' education.
She publicly spoke out for her right and the right of all girls to go to school.
As payback in 2012 when she was 15, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman.
She was flown to a hospital in England where she continues to live.
It's when I read her recent memoir, Finding My Way, that I learned how the bullet changed the course of her life, thrusting her into a new culture and changing her in ways that didn't quite fit her public image as an inspirational hero and top student, and sometimes even challenged her own self-image.
When she was admitted to Oxford University, a dream come true.
She wanted to live the life of a teenager and find time to make friends, have fun, have adventures.
including jumping from her dorm roof to the campus bell tower.
She defied some of her culture's traditions and her parents' expectations, from how she dressed to who she married.
At the same time, she was experiencing PTSD and panic attacks for the first time, recovering from her multiple surgeries and continuing to raise money for the foundation she co-founded with her father in
to advocate and raise money for girls' education in places where that is banned.
All this took time from her college studies, and she felt like a fraud, a symbol of female education who was barely passing some of her classes.
Another thing I learned from her book and from hearing her speak is that she's very self-aware, introspective, and funny.
I spoke with her last Tuesday evening in front of an audience at WHYY where she was given this year's Lifelong Learning Award.