Malala Yousafzai a typical teen, but with tenacious self-belief, says her biographer

Her face is instantly recognisable. The same dark eyes have stared out from a hospital bed, a speaker’s podium at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York, the book jacket of a best-selling autobiography, photographs with heads of state and reports about the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize nominee – not to mention placards raised in protest against her.

Malala Yousafzai is both revered and renounced but, these days, the “education-for-all” campaigner is foremost a 17-year-old girl studying with furious intent at an independent girls’ school in Edgbaston, England. And trying hard like just every other young girl to fit in.

The smart Birmingham suburb isn’t far from the hospital where Malala was treated after the Taliban shot her in the head at point-blank range as she took the bus home from her Swat Valley school two years ago. The murderous attack in which two other schoolgirls were also wounded shocked the world and left its mark in the shape of Malala’s permanently crooked smile.

Fortunately, that day’s violence created another unintended legacy and, as children return to schools across the UAE tomorrow, frantic parents will be glad to know that Malala has collaborated on a second autobiography, this time for younger readers, and that Malala’s love of school and her fierce desire to earn top marks feature prominently.

Published this month, Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Changed the World has been written with Patricia McCormick, the prize-winning author of young-adult fiction. A former journalist, McCormick’s popular novels help young teens tackle the most difficult of subjects: Never Fall Down tells the story of an 11-year-old Cambodian boy who survives the terror of the Khmer Rouge; in Purple Heart, an American teenage soldier agonises over the death of a young Iraqi boy; Sold gives a voice to young trafficked women in India’s sex industry; self-harm and drug addiction are the subjects of Cut and My Brother’s Keeper. As the author tells me: “I write about young people under extraordinary pressure doing extraordinary things.” Surely an apt description of Malala as well.

Original article by Clare Dight

Continue reading at The National:

Malala Yousafzai a typical teen, but with tenacious self-belief, says her biographer