Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad urged policymakers to involve survivors of sexual violence in prevention efforts at a U.N. memoir event, saying their role matters to preventing future abuse, UN News reported.
At the United Nations Bookshop in New York, Murad spoke about how years of public advocacy had affected her sense of self and her effort to reclaim it, the outlet reported. She said treating survivors only as victims weakens prevention efforts, telling the audience, “we’re never going to prevent this from happening.”
Simon & Schuster lists I Choose My Beginning: A Story of Courage and Activism as a Summit Books title published Sept. 15, 2026. UN News said Murad wanted the memoir to tell more of her personal story after years of public attention on her captivity and activism. The outlet contrasted the new book with The Last Girl, which recounted her captivity during the 2014 genocide.
The Nobel Prize biography identifies Murad as a member of Iraq’s Yazidi minority and says Islamic State militants captured her in 2014. She escaped after several months in captivity. Murad and Congolese physician Denis Mukwege shared the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize; the Nobel Prize recognized their work to end “the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”
A 2021 U.N. report cited an estimate from the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Directorate of Yazidi Affairs that 6,417 Yazidis had been abducted, including women, girls, boys and men. The report said 3,543 had been rescued and 2,874 remained missing at the time.
That year, the U.N. investigative team (UNITAD) told the Security Council it had established “clear and convincing evidence” that ISIL committed genocide against the Yazidi as a religious group.
