Some records are broken within a few years. This one has stood for more than a decade: Malala Yousafzai became the youngest Nobel laureate in history on 10 October 2014, when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 17-year-old from Mingora, Swat, would share the Nobel Peace Prize. No younger person has won a Nobel Prize in any category, before or since, which keeps her at the top of our Pakistan world rankings and records list.
The 2014 Announcement That Set the Record
The 2014 Peace Prize was shared, in two equal parts, between Malala Yousafzai and India’s Kailash Satyarthi, “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education”, as committee chairman Thorbjørn Jagland announced in Oslo. The prize drew a record 278 nominations that year. Malala received her medal and diploma at the ceremony in Oslo City Hall on 10 December 2014. She became the second Nobel laureate from Pakistan, after physicist Abdus Salam, and the 47th woman to win a Nobel Prize. Satyarthi, founder of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan movement, was credited in reports with liberating more than 80,000 children from bonded labour, in a world that then counted an estimated 168 million child labourers, 60 million of them in India.
Eight Years Younger Than the Previous Record Holder
Before 2014, the youngest Nobel laureate in any category was Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he shared the 1915 Physics Prize with his father. The youngest Peace laureate before Malala was Tawakkul Karman of Yemen, who was 32 in 2011. At 17, Malala Yousafzai, youngest Nobel laureate in the institution’s history, was eight years younger than Bragg and fifteen years younger than the previous youngest peace winner. Every prize since, in peace, literature, physics, chemistry, medicine and economics, has gone to someone older, so the mark she set as a schoolgirl from Swat is also, year by year, a harder one to take from her.
Photo: DFID, UK Department for International Development, via Wikimedia Commons
The Record in Numbers
- Age at the award: 17, the youngest laureate in any Nobel category
- Previous youngest laureate: Lawrence Bragg, 25, Physics, 1915
- Previous youngest Peace laureate: Tawakkul Karman, 32, in 2011
- Nominations for the 2014 Peace Prize: a record 278
- Shared equally with Kailash Satyarthi; the 47th woman laureate, and Pakistan’s second after Abdus Salam
On the day of the announcement, Malala dedicated the prize beyond herself. “This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education,” she said in her first reaction, and she invited the prime ministers of India and Pakistan to attend the December ceremony together. The Associated Press, reporting the announcement, put the record plainly, calling her “by far the youngest Nobel laureate, eight years younger than the 1915 physics prize winner, 25-year-old Lawrence Bragg”.
What the Youngest Nobel Laureate Did Next
The record was the beginning, not the whole story. Malala, who had survived an assassination attempt in 2012 after campaigning for girls’ schooling in Swat, co-founded the Malala Fund with her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, to campaign for girls’ education worldwide. In 2017 she became the youngest United Nations Messenger of Peace and received honorary Canadian citizenship. The Malala Fund now works in several countries, funding local education champions and pressing governments to spend more on girls’ schooling. She read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from 2017 and graduated in 2020. Her wider life and work, from Swat to the world stage, will be told in full in a forthcoming entry in our Pakistan Facts series, which you can follow on the Amazing Facts About Pakistan page, and she also features in GNP’s coverage of Pakistanis in the Muslim 500. The record itself, though, remains the cleanest line on her page: youngest Nobel laureate ever, at 17, a mark set in 2014 and still untouched.
Sources
- Nobel Prize: Malala Yousafzai, Biographical
- Wikipedia: 2014 Nobel Peace Prize
- Phys.org / Associated Press: Malala, Satyarthi Win Nobel Peace Prize, 10 October 2014
- Featured image: Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, December 2014. Photo: Bair175, via Wikimedia Commons
- In-body image: Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Peace Prize winner. Photo: DFID, UK Department for International Development, via Wikimedia Commons
Umar is an engineer by profession and a passionate writer by passion. He has a deep interest in sharing good news related to Pakistan and has been working hard to promote the positive image of his homeland. Umar has written numerous articles on various topics related to Pakistan, such as technology, sports, culture, and economy.