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| photo: Rinaldo Sata | |
Malala Yousafzai is an education activist, the youngest-ever Nobel laureate, a bestselling author, and an award-winning film producer. She was born in Mingora, Pakistan, in 1997 and graduated from Oxford University in 2020. In her latest memoir, Finding My Way (Atria, October 21, 2025), Yousafzai reintroduces herself to the world.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A book for anyone who has ever felt out of place, yearning for friendship, love, connection. The most personal thing I've ever written.
On your nightstand now:
I'm so suggestible. If someone, even a casual acquaintance, recommends a restaurant, TV show, or book to me, I will probably give it a shot. I like trying new things and going on little cultural/culinary/literary adventures. Though I haven't yet read anything by Lily King, a couple of people have told me to check out Heart the Lover. I'll put that on the nightstand when I'm back from my book tour.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I'd never been inside a bookstore or library until I came to the U.K. at 15 years old. Where I grew up in Pakistan, literacy rates are quite low, and reading to kids or giving children books is uncommon. So I had only a handful of books as a kid. A friend of my dad traveled abroad and brought back Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time for me. When international journalists came to cover what was happening with the Taliban, they brought me selections like Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder.
I was always grateful to receive any book, and I read the ones I had over and over. But I wish I'd had the experience of being able to walk into a bookstore and spend hours browsing for a story that felt exciting or inspiring to me. That just wasn't part of my world as a child.
Your top five authors:
This changes all the time, but I'd love to use this opportunity to shout out some talented Pakistani writers: Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Sanam Maher, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Sara Suleri. Reading their work makes me feel connected to my homeland, even when I'm thousands of miles away.
Book you've faked reading:
Honestly, most of the books my professors assigned in college! My teenage years were quite lonely. So, while it will probably come as a surprise to people who know me as an education advocate, I prioritized my social life in college--house parties, pubs, and late-night kebab runs with my friends.
At the time, I told myself I could go to a library and check out the books on the syllabus in the future. (Though, five years out of college, I'll admit I haven't circled back to any of them.) I suspect my professors already know I wasn't doing the reading, but if they're just finding out now, I'm sorry!
Book you're an evangelist for:
People send me a lot of memoirs. And I always want to give them attention because I know how hard the writing, editing, and promotion processes can be. But I wish they could all be as good as Trevor Noah's Born a Crime. It's raw, funny, personal, and poignant. His descriptions of life in South Africa are so vivid. When he's writing about himself as a boy, I love the way he guides the reader to understand the discrimination he faced from a child's perspective. It's a perfect memoir to me.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I was in London at a charming shop called Word on the Water, which is a floating bookstore or "book barge," and came across the Wordsworth Collector's Edition of Frankenstein. I saw the moody blue cover, gold-foil lettering, and the bolt of lightning down the center, and I had to have it.
Book you hid from your parents:
None when I was a child, but I'm not sure I'd want to loan my mom A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas! When my brothers were in middle school, they used to tell my parents that Game of Thrones was a "historical TV show." My mom and dad never watched it, so the boys got away with that. Sort of how I feel about reading ACOTAR.
Book that changed your life:
When I was 15 years old and in the hospital for months after the attack on my life, someone gave me a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. I'd never heard of it, but immediately found the book so compelling. It felt like exactly what had happened just to me--a moment of terror followed by waking up in an entirely new world that I was struggling to navigate. I was so relieved that Dorothy made it home at the end of the story.
Favorite line from a book:
Lately I have been thinking a lot about these lines from bell hooks's All About Love: "Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."
As a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone--in the hospital and then four lonely years of high school. In college, I surrounded myself with as many friends as possible. As a young adult, I'm learning how to enjoy solitude and why it's sometimes necessary to take a break from socializing.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I went to an event recently and there were tons of celebrities there. They were all lovely and interesting, but then I saw Zadie Smith and just lasered in on her. She was the most important person in the room to me.
I love her for her writing, but also because Zadie, like me, got mediocre grades at Oxford. I read that fact about her when I was struggling in college and it gave me hope that such a luminary was once in the same place as me. I would love to re-read White Teeth.
What you are most looking forward to with the publication of Finding My Way:
This book means so much to me, and I can't wait to share it with readers. I hope other young women can see a bit of themselves in my story, and feel comforted in the knowledge that it's okay to struggle, to stumble a bit on your way to finding yourself. If it can make someone feel less alone, then I have done my job.