In her recent book, Finding My Way, Malala Yousafzai (2017, PPE), recalls arriving at LMH with little sense of who she was or wanted to be – despite already being famous worldwide for her fearless campaigning for girls’ education. As Malala’s new portrait is unveiled at the College, she reflects on how Oxford gave her the precious chance to finally learn about herself.
Many elements of Malala Yousafzai’s LMH experience were somewhat unusual. It was seen as a security risk, for example, for Malala to have her own name on her college ID. So she spent three years seeing the confused looks on people’s faces when they checked her card and saw that it belonged to ‘Jane Lewis’.
“I wanted to go with Jane Austen as my fake name, but that was a bit too obvious,” Malala smiles. “So we thought about Jane Smith, but there are so many Smiths. And then I thought, John Lewis… Jane Lewis, and somehow we ended up there. It would surprise people, because they would see my name on a list and think ‘Who’s Jane Lewis?’ And then I would show up. ‘Oh, this is Jane Lewis!”
Malala also spent her time at LMH being tailed by security guards. With the Taliban in Pakistan regularly restating their determination to take her life, Malala was guarded by two members of the Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Protection Unit. They would walk her to classes and drive her in bulletproof cars. If she went to study in a café, they would go as well, sitting close by wearing suits and earpieces. Initially this caused both confusion and concern among Malala’s friends.
“People would say to me, ‘I think there are some people following you. I keep seeing the same guy behind you, looking suspicious,’” she laughs. “I would explain, ‘No, it’s OK! They’re looking after me. They’re not chasing me!”
These – and many other – strange situations stemmed from the events that first led to Malala becoming celebrated around the world. While living in Pakistan’s Swat Valley under Taliban rule, she had begun blogging for the BBC aged just 11, speaking out fiercely for girls’ right to learn. In 2012, when Malala was 15, a masked Taliban gunman boarded the bus she was taking home from school and asked ‘Who is Malala?’ On finding out, he shot her in the head.
Malala awoke ten days later in a hospital in Birmingham. She has continued to fight for girls’ education ever since, refusing to be intimidated into silence. Aged 17, Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.
That is the story for which Malala became famous. It’s a story of fortitude, fearlessness and activism. But, Malala says, it is also incomplete. As much as her experiences were very different from those of her contemporaries at LMH, she also came up to Oxford with the same questions about identity and belonging that many students face. Malala was not solely an education campaigner or a Nobel laureate; she was a teenager, unsure about exactly who she was. In Oxford, at last, she had the chance to find out.
“Being at LMH helped me grow as a person and be at peace with myself,” Malala says. “It was a transition for me from being a girl to being a young woman. It sounds very simple, but when I say that I changed, I actually changed. I started to feel closer to the Malala that I had always been at heart, growing up in Pakistan, a girl with the wildest dreams who just wanted to roam around the world doing things on her own.
“After I was attacked, that girl had sort of disappeared, because I had become a person who was supposed to do what was expected of her. So from age 15 onwards, I thought, ‘Oh, so my role is to change the world’. I didn’t know how to do that, but everybody was telling me, ‘Oh you are so inspiring and you are going to change the future of girls’ education’. And when you are young, you hear these things and think, ‘OK, I have to live up to all these expectations. Everyone is watching me. I have to represent my culture, my religion, my country, and I can’t get anything wrong.”
She pauses and smiles again. “But in college, I just found my safe exit. I thought, ‘OK, this is a safe space. I might keep some things as they are. I might change some things.’ It’s about allowing yourself the time and space to try things and not be worried.”
Malala says she “fell in love” with LMH the first time she walked through the gates. “I remember noticing the wildflower meadows,” she says. “I remember feeling that the gardens were so big and I could walk here all the time. In the Swat Valley, we have mountains and rivers. I couldn’t find mountains in Oxford but the river always made me feel closer to home. There was something about this place that made me want to study here. I made my decision that day.”
Her face lights up again and again as she discusses different aspects of LMH life. She loved the breakfasts – “full English, eggs, beans, hash browns – that’s my go-to” – but admits she was a picky eater – “so I would just go for French fries with everything”. She loved giving prospective students tours of the college, and the library in particular: “I would always tell people that it didn’t use to be so easy for women to access education or books, so the LMH library was a very special place because it was collecting books for female students”. She joined every society she could, darting around the Freshers’ Fair with a newfound sense of freedom, signing up for philosophy groups and film clubs and the South Asia and Pakistan societies.
But she becomes most animated when she talks about the friendships she formed at LMH. Her high school experience in Birmingham had been disappointingly lonely. “I only made one friend, and that’s because she fell out with her other best friend,” Malala says. Arriving in Oxford, she was determined life would be different – and it was. She found friends who encouraged her to be herself – a teenager who loved dancing and adventure and not taking life too seriously.
“Of course I wanted to study and graduate,” Malala explains, “but when I saw these incredible people similar to my age who wanted to learn and get to know people, get to know themselves and make friends, that’s when my focus changed completely. I wanted to make friends more than anything.”
Her success at building friendships – combined with the fact she continued to travel worldwide to advocate for education – meant Malala struggled at times to keep up with her studies. At one point during her first Hilary term, she flew to Lebanon to give Apple CEO Tim Cook a tour of a Malala Fund programme for Syrian girls, flew back to Oxford for one night, then flew to Switzerland to speak alongside Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and (successfully) press him to prioritise girls’ education.
“After that I got called in by one of my tutors who said she was not happy with my performance,” Malala says. “I was not doing well with my essays, missing deadlines, missing tutorials.” It was the reality check she needed, and though balancing academic life with advocacy and socialising was an ongoing challenge, she became more determined to stop her studies suffering.
“I learned about the academic support that LMH offered,” Malala says, reflecting on her reluctance to ask for help. “I was hesitant initially because I thought I might be the only one and you start thinking maybe you don’t deserve to be here. But actually it helped a lot. I would never want to go back and look at my first few essays, though,” she adds. “They weren’t too good.”
As Malala settled into the unique rhythm of her Oxford life, one address between the Woodstock Road and Walton Street in Jericho came to hold particular significance. At Number 24 Observatory Street, she was introduced to a vivacious group of students from Pakistan. “They were dancing to Punjabi songs, there was Pakistani food, and there were these amazing people who made me feel like I was back with my old friends,” she grins.
It felt as though another part of her identity was falling into place, and then one of the students – Haroon Zaman (2016, Jurisprudence) – mentioned an idea about launching a scheme for Oxford scholarships for students in Pakistan. That idea became the Oxford Pakistan Programme, which has brought dozens of talented students to the University – including through the Malala Yousafzai Scholarship for women pursuing Master’s degrees.
“I have always been very frustrated with inaction – I do not see it as an option,” Malala says, when asked how those early conversations evolved into such an effective programme. “Whenever a friend has come to me with an idea, I always encourage them and I want to be part of it. I tell them I have absolutely no clue how we will make this happen, but I think we will be able to figure it out in the end.”
Today, this same refusal to accept inaction is central to Malala’s ambitions for Malala Fund, which works to break through barriers to girls’ education in Afghanistan, Brazil, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania. Malala works relentlessly to support the “resilience of local activists, because they are the ones who understand the solutions needed”. And she speaks furiously on issues from the “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan to the widespread recent cuts to development aid budgets, including in the UK.
“If we invest in education,” she says, “we’re more climate resilient, we can reduce poverty, we can improve economies. Girls’ education is a basic human right, but the benefits are not limited to the girls themselves. Everyone benefits.”
It is clear that Malala’s time at LMH has only increased her resolve. She changed and grew in Oxford, but the experience clarified her sense of purpose, rather than altering it. And now, following the unveiling of Isabella Watkins’ portrait of Malala at LMH earlier this year, visitors to the College will be able to join us in celebrating Malala’s vision and her achievements for generations to come.
“I never thought that my portrait would be hanging on a wall at LMH, but this is my connection with the college,” she says. “I am always there in my heart and now I am there as a portrait. It is an honour. I will always love LMH and keep visiting, but I feel like I’m always there in spirit now.”
Seeing the painting reminded her, she says, of how she felt on her first visit to LMH, standing before our portrait of Benazir Bhutto (1973, PPE), the first Asian woman elected President of the Oxford Union. “When I saw Benazir Bhutto’s painting at LMH,” Malala remembers, “I felt that I could be here as well, so I hope my portrait will do the same. I hope it sends a message to many more students – to say you also deserve to be here.”
This is an article that first appeared in LMH News 2026. You can read the full issue on our publications page.
