An Evening with Malala Yousafzai

The three tiers of the Barbican Theatre were packed to the gunnels. They had come to hear from a most remarkable confident yet unassuming young woman who has become the figurehead for the campaign for universal education for girls and women.

A proud citizen of the Swat Valley, together with her family they were driven from their home by the rise of the Taliban. You can read her own story in “I Am Malala”. After being shot on a school bus and placed in an induced coma she eventually ended up in Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham where she was nursed back to health and Birmingham became her adopted home.

She became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaigning work. As she acknowledged she owed so much to her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai a Pakistani education activist who, against the custom of his culture, took pride in having a daughter, encouraged her independence and pioneered female education in Pakistan in general and the Swat in particular. Being proud of a strong, confident daughter who now operates on a world stage is something I share with Ziauddin. It is wrong that in our times, in so many countries, women's education is at best curtailed, at worst non existent.  It is a travesty in our own country and our own time that those who should understand instead force the closure of libraries and use fiscal restraint to force music and drama from the mainstream curriculum!

Malala took to the stage full of confidence. Enthralled the audience and raised more than a few laughs, answered many questions and left to a spontaneous, rousing and lasting standing ovation.

In her latest book “We Are Displaced” Malala strives to bring to life the personalities, aspirations, hopes and dreams of displaced young women, often caught up in refugee camps, showing them not as stereotyped groups to be feared or hated but as individuals hit on hard times, not of their own making, striving for better more normal lives.

Malala Yousafzai – a wonderful human being and a great humanitarian. 

(All proceeds from the sales of her books go to the Malala Fund)