Up until three years ago, Nadia Murad had largely read words written by men. “I read my first ever book written by a woman when I was in college, The Diary of Anne Frank,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I grew up in a village and country where I didn’t really know that women could write books and document their stories.”
Murad reflects on that discovery just before the publication of her second book, I Choose My Beginning, out September 15. Her first, The Last Girl, released in 2017, was a New York Times bestseller. “Writing a memoir, it’s not easy. You are in this constant conversation with your past self, your current self, and you’re bringing your future self into it,” she says. “It’s not an easy process, but it’s a process that can make you proud of how far you’ve come.”
In August 2014, ISIS militants attacked Murad’s village of Kocho, Iraq, and executed her mother and six of her brothers. Part of the Yazidi religious minority, Murad, along with her younger female relatives and friends, was kidnapped and sold as a sex slave to ISIS fighters. She escaped from captivity in November 2014, after months of rape and abuse. Murad soon began speaking publicly about ISIS’s systemic use of conflict-related sexual violence with the goal of wiping out the Yazidi population in Iraq. Her testimony helped persuade the State Department to formally recognize ISIS’s actions against the Yazidis as genocide in 2016.
But behind the scenes, Murad writes, her “every move was choreographed” by her handlers, from what she wore to when she smiled. As noted in a New York Times interview with Murad from that year, “she does not smile much, and she rarely veers away from her prepared remarks, in Arabic.… She sometimes looks as though she would rather be doing anything other than recounting for well-dressed, influential world leaders the horrors she lived through.”
“People think that survival is the end of the story, but you keep choosing it. I was surrounded by the wrong people, but I had a story,” Murad, now 33, tells Vanity Fair. “I had almost my entire family [still] in captivity. I was desperate to do the work, to convince the world to act. And I took everything that was coming with that, especially from men who were supposed to be my translators. Who had higher education, more languages, and were driving me from here to there. I was quickly learning that they have their own agendas.”
In her latest book, Murad writes that she “didn’t imagine justice in a courtroom until Amal,” as in Amal Clooney, the human rights lawyer who began representing her in 2016. (And just so happens to be married to an Oscar winner named George.) That same year, Murad was named the United Nations’ first goodwill ambassador for the dignity of survivors of human trafficking. And in 2018, she won the Nobel Peace Prize at age 25 for her work to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, along with Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege. She became the second-youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize after the activist Malala Yousafzai, who had survived a shooting by the Taliban and was honored in 2014 for her fight for children’s right to education.
