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Today Malala Yousafzai has become the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and was named one of the world’s most influential people by the Times last year. This young girl grew up in a world of wars and witnessed horrors unimaginable to us yet despite personal setbacks and the laws of the Taliban jungle her voice was heard.

In 2008 BBC reporters were looking for a new way to document the Taliban's actions in Swat, Pakistan, and proposed finding a young school girl to blog about life under the Taliban regime. The Taliban is a violent Islamic movement and at the time it was planning to deprive girls of the right to education. Local school teacher Ziauddin Yousafzai couldn’t find a pupil willing to do it so he recommended his own 11 year old daughter Malala. Page after page Malala provided an inside account on the atrocities committed by the Taliban regime whilst expressing her dream to continue school and for girls to be educated. In her diary Malala used the pseudonym (pretend name) Gul Makai, taken from a traditional tale, so she wouldn’t risk being found guilty of writing against the Taliban. In one of Malala’s most heart-breaking pages she describes her last day of school before Christmas break, a day in which usually all the girls would be delighted to have some time off from class, yet Malala along with others looked at their school lovingly wondering whether they would be allowed to return in the new year.

Even once the Taliban was able to remove girls from school Malala still continued studying for her exam, this passion and drive she had infuriated the Taliban. In 2012 Malala Yousafzai had acquired fame for her publications and was shot by the Taliban as she rode home on a bus after having taken an exam. The gunman asked which one of the girls Malala was and then shot her in the head also wounding another two girls. Malala was transported to a hospital in Peshawar where she was operated on and luckily the bullet had moved down towards her shoulder allowing Malala to survive the attempted assassination and horrifying ordeal. News coverage of the event was rapid and soon global leaders were praising Malala for her courage. An investigation quickly took place and the culprit, a 23 year old man, was soon identified. That same year UN Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown, who was also Prime Minister of the UK from 2007 to 2010, launched a petition in Malala’s name. After her recovery Malala spoke in front of the UN in July 2013 (the exact date she spoke is now known as ‘Malala Day’) and confronted US President Obama about his drone use in Pakistan. Today at the age of seventeen Malala continues to strive for women’s rights and universal education rights and although Malala is still faced with an uphill battle she has become an iconic inspiration to people worldwide.