Tickets go on sale Friday (Oct. 3) for the Nov. 18 Chancellor’s Colloquium with Malala Yousafzai

For his first colloquium of the academic year, Chancellor Gary S. May will share the stage with education activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, who is set to release a new memoir this fall.

Yousafzai and May’s conversation is set for Nov. 18 in the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts’ Jackson Hall, as part of the Chancellor’s Colloquium Distinguished Speaker Series. Tickets are available now.

An advocate for education, and a target

Yousafzai grew up in Pakistan, and was a seventh-grader in an all-girls school run by her father in 2009 when the Taliban banned girls from seeking education and forced all-girls schools to close. They had already destroyed dozens of schools.

As that edict went into effect, BBC’s Urdu service published entries from Yousafzai’s journal under a pseudonym, seeking to show how the Taliban’s rule was affecting the lives of ordinary schoolchildren.

“I am of the view that the school will one day reopen but while leaving I looked at the building as if I would not come here again,” she wrote on her last day in school before both a winter holiday and the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education.

Following the BBC diary entries, she appeared as the subject of a New York Times documentary; in subsequent years she continued to advocate publicly for access to education.

In 2012, Yousafzai survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban. A gunman had boarded a school bus and demanded to know which student was Yousafzai, then shot her in the head.

She received treatment and continued her own education in England, and continued her activism. The next year, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, and spoke before the United Nations Youth Assembly on her 16th birthday.

“Dear sisters and brothers, I'm not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group,” she said. “I'm here to speak up for the right of education of every child.”

Nobel laureate, author

In 2014 she was named a joint recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her “struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” At 17 years old, she was youngest ever Nobel laureate.

Yousafzai and her father created the Malala Fund, a nonprofit that has opened schools and fought against other barriers to education in various regions of the world. Yousafzai told the story of her early life and assassination attempt in the memoir I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban. She has published three children’s books and a book about refugees, and her latest memoir, Finding My Way, is set to be published Oct. 21.

Publisher Simon & Schuster calls Yousafzai’s latest memoir “vulnerable” and “surprising.”

“Finding My Way is a story of friendship and first love, of anxiety and self-discovery, of trying to stay true to yourself when everyone wants to tell you who you are,” the publisher says. “In it, Malala traces her path from high school loner to reckless college student to a young woman at peace with her past. Through candid, often messy moments like nearly failing exams, getting ghosted, and meeting the love of her life, Malala reminds us that real role models aren’t perfect — they’re human.”