When the Taliban closed schools and banned women from public life in Pakistan's Swat Valley, a schoolgirl named Malala Yousafzai spoke out. But activism nearly cost Yousafzai her life; in 2012, when she was 15, she was shot in the head while riding home on a school bus.

Yousafzai survived the assassination attempt, but her life changed completely. Suddenly she was a symbol of resistance to the Taliban — praised, politicized and picked apart. When she was 17, she became the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize , an honor that weighed on her as she went off to Oxford University a few years later.

"I always have felt that now I need to live up to the expectation [of the Nobel]," Yousafzai says. "It was given for the work I had done, but it was also given for the work tha

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