LONDON (Diya TV) —- Bodhana Sivanandan, an 11-year-old schoolgirl from Harrow in North London, has become England’s top-rated female chess player, according to FIDE’s April 2026 rankings. She displaced four-time British Women’s Champion Lan Yao, aged 25, at the top of the list, and has also broken into the world’s top 100 women for the first time, sitting at number 72 with a rating of 2366.
The achievement is all the more striking given how recently she came to the game. She found a chessboard in a bag her father had intended to throw out during the 2020 lockdown. Her father, who works in IT, knew only the most basic rules. From that starting point, her rise through the ranks has been relentless.
Fifteen months after learning the game, chess columnist Leonard Barden described her as “exceptional,” noting she was world number one in blitz in her under-8 age group by a margin of 322 FIDE points. By 2022, she had become England’s first World Youth Champion in 25 years, winning all 24 games she played at the European Schools Championship to claim three gold medals.
The records have kept coming. In December 2023, she finished 73rd out of 555 players at the European Blitz Championship, taking the top women’s prize in the process. In February 2024, she crossed a live rating of 2000, one of the three highest ever recorded for an eight-year-old. That same year, she was picked for England’s women’s team at the Chess Olympiad in Budapest making her the youngest person ever selected for a full England team in any sport. She was nine years old at the time and occasionally needed a booster seat during matches.
In 2025, her results against titled players began to draw serious international attention. In July of that year, she became the youngest player ever to earn a Woman Grandmaster norm, surpassing Hou Yifan, who had achieved the feat as an 11-year-old back in 2005. A month later at the British Chess Championship in Liverpool, she defeated 60-year-old Grandmaster Peter Wells to become the youngest ever Woman International Master, at ten years, five months, and three days breaking the record previously held by American player Carissa Yip. She then defeated former women’s world champion Grandmaster Mariya Muzychuk of Ukraine at the European Chess Club Cup in October, and won the UK Women’s Blitz Championship in November.
Her rating surge in early 2026 has been equally dramatic. Between February and early March, she gained 203 rating points across events at the 4NCL, the Graz Open in Austria, and the Cannes Chess Festival in France, crossing 2300 to earn the FIDE Master title. She was also competing at the Reykjavik Open in Iceland as recently as last week, picking up four wins in a highly competitive open field.
Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak congratulated her on social media, noting that the two had once played each other in the Downing Street garden. “Let’s just say her success has not come as a shock,” he wrote.
Within her birth year of 2015, her rating is comparable to the leading boys of the same generation, including Russia’s Roman Shogdzhiev and Singapore’s Ashwath Kaushik. She continues to attend primary school, is preparing for SAT examinations, and studies both violin and piano. Her stated ambition is to become the youngest grandmaster in history, a record currently held by American Abhimanyu Mishra, who achieved it at 12.
