5 things to know about Malala Yousafzai, youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner ever

By Matthew T. Hall6:30 a.m.Oct. 10, 2014 Updated10:42 a.m.

FILE - In this file photo taken Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, Malala Yousafzai speaks about her fight for girls' education on the International Day of the Girl at the World Bank in Washington. Teenage activist Malala Yousafzai has jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for her "heroic struggle" for girls' rights to education, it is announced Friday Oct. 10, 2014. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) The Associated Press

Seventeen-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize Friday.

A teenage advocate for education with a brave and buoyant story to tell, Yousafzai shares this year's honor with Kailash Satyarthi, who has campaigned against child trafficking and child labor in India.

Here are five things you should know about Malala Yousafzai. The jubilant reaction to Friday's announcement follows.

• Malala blogged for the BBC in 2009 as she defied a Taliban edict that banned girls from going to school. She was 11.

I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taleban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taleban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools.

Only 11 students attended the class out of 27. The number decreased because of Taleban's edict. My three friends have shifted to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families after this edict. On my way from school to home I heard a man saying 'I will kill you'. I hastened my pace and after a while I looked back if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else over the phone.

• She was targeted and shot in the head and neck almost exactly two years ago following all the publicity she received for opposing that Taliban campaign to close schools.

Per a CNN report from the time:

She was coming home from school in a van with other schoolchildren when Taliban assassins stopped the vehicle, climbed on and demanded that the children identify her. Terrified, the children did it and the men fired, also wounding two other girls.

"We do not tolerate people like Malala speaking against us," a Taliban spokesman later said, as Malala, in a Pakistani hospital, breathed with the help of a ventilator.

The Taliban would come for her again if she managed to survive, the spokesman threatened.

• She was the runner-up for Time magazine’s 2012 Person of the Year. She lost to President Barack Obama, who also has the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to his credit.

• She is by far the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. That distinction used to belong to Tawakkol Karman, an activist in Yemen who was 32 when she shared the award with two other women in 2011. The average age of winners the year they won? 62.

• She so impressed Jon Stewart last year, hours before she won the Sakharov Prize, Europe's top human-rights award, that The Daily Show host actually asked the girl if her father would be mad if he adopted her.

In the interview, she told him: "I raised my voice on every platform that I could, and I said I need to tell the world what is happening in Swat and I need to tell the world that Swat is suffering from terrorism and we need to fight against terrorism."

The most impressive, inspirational part of the interview is what she says from 3:48 to 5:06 in response to this question of Stewart's: "When did you realize the Taliban had made you a target?"