Malala Yousafzai Named as Top Nobel Peace Prize Contender

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Much like Oscar season, the period before the announcement of each year’s Nobel Prize recipients is marked with speculation: Who will win?

The much-anticipated news of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner won’t be revealed until Friday, October 11—but one organization, the International Peace Research Institute, has released its short list of favorites for the honor. Topping the list is Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani activist who rose to international fame when she took on the Taliban and demanded access to school for girls. “Malala would not only be timely and fitting with a line of awards to champions of human rights and democracy, but also sets both children and education on the peace and conflict agenda,” Kristian Berg Harpviken, head of the International Peace Research Institute, said in a statement. Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban assassins last October, and has since staged a miraculous recovery. “It feels like this life is not my life. It’s a second life,” she writes in her autobiography I Am Malala, excerpted exclusively in this Sunday’s Parade. “People have prayed to God to spare me and I was spared for a reason—to use my life for helping people.” If Yousafzai is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she’ll be one of only 15 female recipients and the youngest winner by far (the average age of the previous laureates is 62, and the youngest winner so far is Yemeni journalist Tawakkol Karman, who won the honor at age 32 in 2011). Other top contenders for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Oslo-based organization that predicts laureates every year, include: Uganda peace advocate Sister Mary Tarcisia Lakot; Russian activists Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Svetlana Gannushkina and Lilya Shibanova; Guatemalan attorney general Claudia Paz y Paz; and Congolese gynecologist and anti-sexual violence activist Denis Mukwege. The Nobel Prize, selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, has been awarded since 1901. Previous winners of the peace honor include Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., and President Barack Obama