On July 12, 1997, Malala Yousafzai was born in Mingora, in the Swat Valley of Pakistan — the daughter of a schoolteacher who ran a girls' school and who, unusually for the region and the culture, registered his daughter's birth with her name listed first.

In 2007, the Taliban began imposing control over the Swat Valley. Schools for girls were ordered closed. Malala began writing an anonymous diary for the BBC Urdu service at age eleven, documenting the closures, the explosions, the soldiers, the disappearances. In 2009, the government briefly retook the valley. The diary was published. Her identity was revealed.

She continued to speak publicly about girls' education. On October 9, 2012, a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus, identified her by name, and shot her in the head. She was fifteen.

She survived. The bullet had passed through her skull and lodged in her shoulder. She spent months in rehabilitation in the United Kingdom, learning to walk and speak again. She returned to school.

In 2014, she received the Nobel Peace Prize — the youngest Nobel laureate in history, at seventeen. Her father, Ziauddin, said afterward that people asked him how he raised such a brave daughter. He said the right question was: what did I not do to break her?