Malala Yousafzai

Yousafzai was eleven when she began writing an anonymous diary for the BBC Urdu service about life under Taliban rule in the Swat valley, where girls' schools were being blown up. At fifteen, in October 2012, a gunman boarded her school bus, asked for her by name and shot her in the head; she was flown to Birmingham and had part of her skull replaced. She returned to school there, read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, and became the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, at seventeen. I Am Malala was written with the journalist Christina Lamb and is banned in many Pakistani private schools.