NEW YORK, Oct 10: Malala Yousufzai, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize among others, was in New York on Thursday, the eve of this year’s prize announcement, to promote her memoir of her campaign for girls’ education and surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban.

Malala was in the city for an interview, just hours after the announcement she won the $65,000 Sakharov Award, Europe’s top human rights award. The accolade and buzz for Malala came almost exactly a year after she was shot in the head for her outspoken support for girls’ education.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee will say only that a record 259 candidates, including 50 organisations, have been nominated this year.

Besides Malala, others getting attention are Congolese surgeon Dr Denis Mukwege, an advocate for women’s rights; Svetlana Gannushkina and the Memorial human rights group she heads in Russia; Egyptian computer scientist Maggie Gobran, who chucked her academic career to become a nun and run a charity; and Chelsea Manning, the US soldier convicted of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks.—Agencies