Author: Maria Toorpakai

South Waziristan, in the tribal belt of north-west Pakistan, allowed girls no part in sport when Toorpakai was small. Her father, unusually for the district, agreed to let her live outwardly as a boy so that she could compete, and she did so for years, first at weightlifting and then at squash. Once her sex became known at the national academy the threats began, and she trained largely alone indoors, hitting a ball against her bedroom wall for hours a day. She wrote to clubs and coaches abroad for three years before Jonathon Power, the former world number one, answered, and in 2011 she moved to his academy in Toronto. Her world ranking peaked at forty-first in December 2012. A Different Kind of Daughter, written with Katharine Holstein and published in 2016, covers all of it, and it is as much about her father's obstinacy as her own.