Malala Finds Her Way
Fresh Air
NPR
4.4 • 34.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After surviving the Taliban's 2012 attempted assassination, activist Malala Yousafzai didn't back down. She continued to advocate for girls' education across the globe. In 2014, Yousafzai became the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize, an honor that weighed on her when she went off to college. In ‘Finding My Way,’ she writes about her life at Oxford and beyond. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about reliving childhood, PTSD, and her decision to get married.
Also, critic at large John Powers highlights some things he wish he had reviewed this year.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Terry Gross. Somehow, we're almost at the end of 2025. It's been a rough year for a lot of people |
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| 0:36.5 | at Fresh Air, we will keep bringing you interviews with |
| 0:39.4 | investigative reporters, uncovering some of the most important stories of our time, as well as |
| 0:45.4 | interviews with authors, actors, directors, musicians, composers, scientists, health experts, religion |
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| 1:39.3 | This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today we continue our end-of-the-year retrospective, featuring some of our |
| 1:46.0 | favorite interviews of 2025, including this one, which was recorded in October. |
| 1:52.4 | College is often a time to figure out who we are, to fall in love for the first time, to experiment, |
| 1:58.2 | to fail, to question what we believe. But for Malala Yusuf Sai, it was different. |
| 2:04.3 | She spent her college years experiencing all of these things under scrutiny and 24-hour security. |
| 2:10.8 | When she was 15, Malala survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban, a gunshot to the head |
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