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A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster
Scribner
October 2012
On Sale: October 9, 2012
232 pages
ISBN: 1451657811
EAN: 9781451657814
Kindle: B007EE4M90
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
Based on a popular ESPN magazine article selected by Dave
Eggers for The Best American Nonrequired Reading and a
finalist for a National Magazine Award, the inspiring true
story of Phiona Mutesi, a teenage chess prodigy from the
slums of Kampala, Uganda. PHIONA MUTESI sleeps in a
decrepit shack with her mother and three siblings and
struggles to find a single meal each day. Phiona has been
out of school most of her life because her mother cannot
afford it, so she is only now learning to read and write.
Phiona Mutesi is also one of the best chess players in the
world. One day in 2005, while searching for food,
nine-year-old Phiona followed her brother to a dusty veranda
where she met Robert Katende, who had also grown up in the
Kampala slums. Katende, a war refugee turned missionary, had
an improbable dream: to empower kids through chess—a game so
foreign there is no word for it in their native language.
Laying a chessboard in the dirt of the Katwe slum, Robert
painstakingly taught the game each day. When he left at
night, slum kids played on with bottlecaps on scraps of
cardboard. At first they came for a free bowl of porridge,
but many grew to love chess, a game that—like their daily
lives—means persevering against great obstacles. Of these
kids, one stood out as an immense talent: Phiona. By
the age of eleven Phiona was her country’s junior champion
and at fifteen, the national champion. In September 2010,
she traveled to Siberia, a rare journey out of Katwe, to
compete in the Chess Olympiad, the world’s most prestigious
team-chess event. Phiona’s dream is to one day become a
Grandmaster, the most elite title in chess. But to reach
that goal, she must grapple with everyday life in one of the
world’s most unstable countries, a place where girls are
taught to be mothers, not dreamers, and the threats of AIDS,
kidnapping, and starvation loom over the people. Like
Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Gayle
Tzemach Lemmon’s The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, The Queen of
Katwe is an intimate and heartrending portrait of human life
on the poor fringes of the twenty-first century.
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