LONDON, (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage education activist who survived a near-fatal attack by the Taliban, and her family have become millionaires in under four years due to sales of a book about her life and appearances on the global speaker circuit.
Yousafzai, 18, the youngest person to win the Nobel peace prize, shot to international fame after emerging defiant from the assassination attempt on a school bus in Pakistan’s Swat valley in October 2012 to continue her fight for girls’ rights.
Yousafzai, who received medical treatment in Britain where she now lives, is in constant demand globally, charging $152,000 per speech compared with Desmond Tutu’s reported $85,000, according to U.S.-based Institute for Policy Studies.
Her memoir, “I Am Malala”, published in 2013, has sold 287,170 copies in Britain with a total value of about 2.2 million pounds ($3 million) and over 1.8 million copies worldwide, according to a spokesman from Nielsen Book Research.
