‘I do it because I like it’: Bodhana Sivanandan, 11, on being youngest ever ‘woman grandmaster’

London schoolgirl’s father taught her to play when she was five, and three years later she beat former British champion

Over the weekend, 11-year-old Bodhana Sivanandan became the youngest ever holder of the title of woman grandmaster at the Chess Olympiad in Uzbekistan – while playing on a car booster seat so she could reach the board. By Tuesday morning she was back at school in north London for a design and technology lesson.

Bodhana has to juggle the competing pressures of being an international chess sensation with the more ordinary challenges of childhood and her first term at secondary school.

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