British politician and former Prime Minister of UK, Rishi Sunak took to X on April 3, 2026, to congratulate Bodhana Sivanandan, an Indian-origin 11-year-old. Sivanandan who belongs to Harrow, became England’s top female chess player recently.”Huge congratulations to Bodhana Sivanandan on becoming England’s top female chess player at just 11 years old.” he wrote. “We once played each other in the Downing Street garden,” he shared while adding that Sivanandan’s success has not come as a shock.
Who is Bodhana Sivanandan?
Bodhana Sivanandan was born on March 7, 2015 in London, to parents who had relocated to the United Kingdom from Tiruchirappalli in 2007. She recently secured the 72nd position in the International Chess Federation’s global women’s rankings. She is the top-rated female player in England, having achieved a rating of 2,366. By securing the position, the teenager replaced 25-year-old Lan Yao, who previously held the position.Sivanandan was only five years old when she took a liking to the game. It was during the pandemic that she found a chessboard belonging to her father, which he had planned to donate to charity. “I said it’s a game but she didn’t believe me, so I had to put on a YouTube video to explain. Then she asked about the rules — I knew just the very, very basics,” said her father, an IT professional, to The Times. “Slowly her interest got better and better, and she started playing better as well, so we kept playing more and more chess.”At seven, Sivanandan appeared at the European Schools Championship in 2022 and won all of her 24 matches, going home with three golds. In 2023, she gained an official FIDE title, that of a women’s candidate master as her rating surpassed 2,000. In 2024, she set a record to become the youngest person to represent England in any sport when she was selected for the Chess Olympiad in Hungary. A year later, she became the youngest female player to beat a grandmaster when she defeated the 60-year-old Peter Wells at the British Chess Championships in Liverpool in August 2025.Currently a sixth-year student, she hopes to become the youngest grandmaster in history. However, Sivandan follows a line of British chess prodigies to rise up in the world of board games. Shreyas Royal became the UK’s youngest ever grandmaster at age 15 in 2024, and Supratit Banerjee, 12, was recently raised to the rank of master.
