Speaker

The speaker of the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani human rights activist. In 2014, the 17-year-old Yousafzai became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history.

Born in a Pashtun family in 1997 in Mingora, the largest city in the Swat Valley district of Pakistan (now the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan), Yousafzai is the daughter of Ziauddin Yousafzai and Tor Pekai Yousafzai, whom she also mentions in her speech (p. 481, ll. 10-14).

In 2013, she published her autobiography, titled “I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban”, and was awarded by the European Parliament with the Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought. In 2014, having co-founded the Malala Fund with her father, Yousafzai began traveling to other parts of the world where children, especially girls, did not have equal access to education, such as Jordan, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Yousafzai accepts the Nobel Peace Prize two years after she survived an assassi...