Malala memoir makes her millionaire

The 18-year-old Pakistani teenager who survived a shot to the head by the Taliban had relived the incident and her life in the Swat Valley in ‘I am Malala’, co-written with Sunday Times journalist Christina Lamb. 

A company set up to protect the rights to her life story had 2.2 million pounds in the bank by August 2015 and made a pre-tax profit of 1.1 million pounds. 

Her autobiography, which documents her experiences growing up in Pakistan’s Swat Valley under Taliban rule and being shot while travelling home from school on the bus with her friends, was published in October 2013 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK in a deal reported to be worth about 2 million pounds. It has sold at least 1.8 million copies worldwide, according to Neilsen Book Research. 

According to research by the US-based Institute for Policy Studies, Malala is also one of the higher-earning Nobel laureates, bringing in 114,000 pounds per speech, compared with 64,000 pounds for Desmond Tutu.