London: Malala Yousufzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani girl child education campaigner who was shot nearly-fatally in 2012 by a Taliban gunman, is the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize, according to The Guardian.
Malala won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize along with Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi.
Before Malala, Australia-born British citizen William Lawrence Bragg was the youngest Nobel laureate when he won the physics Nobel in 1915 at the age of 25.
Malala won for what the Nobel Committee called her “heroic struggle” for girls’ right to education. She is the youngest ever winner of the prize, the paper said.
Malala and India’s Satyarthi were named the joint winners of the eight-million kronor ($1.1 million) prize by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee – Norway’s former prime minister Thorbjoern Jagland – Friday morning.
Malala, 17, was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman two years ago in Pakistan when she was on her way to school in a bus. A critically injured Malala was airlifted, at the Pakistan government expense, to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where she was treated for life-threatening injuries and pulled back from the brink.