Anya Corke | |
---|---|
Full name | Anya Sun Corke |
Country |
Hong Kong (until 2009) England (since 2009) [1] |
Born | California, United States | September 12, 1990
Title | Woman Grandmaster (2004) |
Peak rating | 2301 (October 2008) |
Anya Sun Corke (born 12 September 1990 in California, USA) is an American-born English chess player holding the title of Woman Grandmaster (WGM). She played for Hong Kong, where she was the top ranked chess player, until 2009. [2]
Corke earned the WGM title with her performance in the 36th Chess Olympiad, playing for the Hong Kong men's team. [3] [4]
She was the 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2008 Hong Kong National Champion (for men and women), one of the youngest national champions ever at the age of 13 years and 9 months.
She was the British Junior Under-11 Champion in 2002 [5] and the Under-12 Champion in 2003, [6] the first girl to win either of these age groups. In 2004, she became joint British U-14 Champion. [7]
In December 2004, she won the Asian Youth Girls U-14 Championship in Singapore. [8]
In August 2005, she jointly won with Alisa Melekhina and Abby Marshall the second annual Susan Polgar National Invitational for Girls under-19. [9]
Corke represented the England Women's team at the 2012 Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, Turkey, [10] [11] and the 2013 European Team Championship in Warsaw, Poland. [12]
In 2013, Corke graduated from Wellesley College summa cum laude with a B.A. in Russian and Philosophy. [13] [14]
In 2014, she started a Ph.D. program in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. [15] She obtained an M.A. and M.Phil Slavic Languages and Literatures (specializing in Russian). [16]
In 2019, Corke started the J.D. program at Yale Law School. [17]
Corke is married and lives in the United States with her husband. [18]
Her photograph was misappropriated by supporters of Barisan Nasional, the ruling political party of Malaysia, to depict the victim in a controversy alleging sexual misconduct by the son of Lim Guan Eng, who is one of the leaders of DAP, a Malaysian opposition party. [19] DAP and their supporters then contacted Anya Corke to obtain an official denial that she knows Lim Guan Eng's son; she confirmed that the allegations were false, and that the photo was used without her knowledge or consent. [20] [21] The original photo used in this controversy was stolen from an article on the website ChessBase News, and had the chess board cropped out. [22]