Pakistan’s Malala signs $3-M deal to write life story

LONDON, United Kingdom – Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl shot by the Taliban for promoting girls’ education, is to tell her life story in a book due out later this year, the publishers said Thursday, March 28, in a deal reportedly worth around $3-M.

The book will be entitled “I Am Malala”.

“I hope the book will reach people around the world, so they realise how difficult it is for some children to get access to education,” the 15-year-old Pakistani said in a statement.

“I want to tell my story, but it will also be the story of 61 million children who can’t get education. I want it to be part of the campaign to give every boy and girl the right to go to school. It is their basic right.”

The deal is reportedly worth £2 million ($3 million, 2.4 million euros).

Malala was shot at point-blank range by a Taliban gunman as her school bus traveled through northwest Pakistan’s Swat Valley on October 9 last year, in an attack that drew worldwide condemnation.

She was flown to Britain for surgery on her head injuries and, having recovered sufficiently, returned to school in Birmingham, central England earlier this month.

Education advocate

Malala has become a global symbol of the campaign for girls’ right to an education and has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The book will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in Commonwealth countries and by Little, Brown elsewhere. It is due to be published in the next six to nine months.

In an extract released by the publishers, Malala described the day she was shot.

“We’d finished for the day and I was squashed between my friends and teachers on the benches of the open-back truck we use as a school bus,” she wrote.

“There were no windows, just thick plastic sheeting that flapped at the sides and was too yellowed and dusty to see out of, and a postage stamp of open sky at the back through which I caught a glimpse of a kite wheeling up and down. It was pink, my favourite colour.”

She first rose to prominence aged 11 with a blog for the BBC’s Urdu-language service charting her life under the Taliban.

Since her attempted murder, millions of people have signed petitions supporting her cause. – Rappler.com