Fiamma Interviews Author Kyla Zhao
Kyla Zhou is an incredible female author and Forbes 30 Under 30 award winner who has written many empowering novels and books. These books include the chess novel “May The Best Player Win,” which has won the 2025 Mathical Honor Book Award.
BY Fiamma Orellana
Success Academy Bed Stuy Middle School
HER LEAGUE MEMBER & HER NEWS COLUMNIST
Kyla Zhao, author of May The Best Player Win. Photo courtesy of kylazhao.com.
Kyla Zhou is an incredible female author and Forbes 30 Under 30 award winner who has written many empowering novels and books. These books include the chess novel “May The Best Player Win,” which has won the 2025 Mathical Honor Book Award, an award presented to fiction and nonfiction novels that inspire children to see math in the world around them. Kyla voices the struggles of women not only in the chess field, but in their everyday lives as well, in her amazing and inspiring novel. The fact that this amazing female author agreed to give me the opportunity of interviewing her makes me believe that we should build up an inspiring community that instructs and supports each other.
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How did your years at Stanford University contribute to your interest in chess?
I don’t really think my years at Stanford really contributed to my interest in chess. By the time I got to college, I hadn’t been playing chess for quite a few years.I quit chess in middle school because there weren’t many girls around, and I was also starting to get very anxious about chess. I was so focused on wanting to win and wanting to get medals and trophies that the pressure got to be too much. By the time I got to Stanford, I wasn’t playing chess at all. During the pandemic, a lot of people began playing chess, mainly because of things like chess.com and chess streamers. My friends learned chess and seemed to be having a great time with it, even though they were really bad at it. It made me think back to my first years of chess, back when I was still playing really badly yet enjoying myself. As I started reminiscing, that’s when I got my idea for May The Best Player Win.
Do you think you regret quitting chess when you were younger?
I don’t regret it. I think it was a good decision, because the anxiety was starting to get to a physical level. Every time I sat down in front of the chessboard, I felt like I was going to puke or like I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want that to continue — it wasn’t sustainable or healthy. What I do regret is that I never told my coaches, parents, or friends any of this. I thought that I was feeling these emotions because I was weak, and sometimes, guys view girls as too emotional. I didn’t want to feed into that stereotype by admitting how weak I felt, so I kept those feelings bottled up to myself. In hindsight, I wish I had told somebody so I wouldn’t have had to face my emotions alone.
How did you start to pursue your career in writing?
In 2020, all my friends were starting to leave due to the pandemic. Most countries were shutting down their borders, so I had to decide whether to go home to Singapore or stay where I was. I was nervous that if I went to Singapore, they wouldn’t let me back. Everybody at that time thought that the pandemic would last a year or even a few months, and then everybody would go back to school. So I decided to stay in California. For most of the year, I lived by myself in a small apartment in Northern California. I was very lonely and I also witnessed a lot of rising anti-Asian racism. That got me thinking about how the media portrayed Asian people at the time in a very criminal and derogatory way. I wanted to reclaim my own identity for myself. So I started writing — it was my way of channeling my thoughts and emotions into something when I had nobody to confide in.
You majored in MA and Psychology at Stanford. Do you think you were originally going to start writing, or were you focusing on something else?
I didn’t think I was going to write at all. I had never written anything in the past or even taken a writing class, and at the beginning, I didn’t even think I was going to be published at all. I didn’t think it was possible for a non-American to be published in America. In hindsight, I think that not originally wanting to be an author helped me write without any stress, pressure, or expectations.
I see that you had a Psychology major at Stanford. How did this help you express how Mai was feeling/create the characters?
For me, it was not super difficult, because I don’t think I’m like Mai — she’s more spunky. But I do think that her experiences with imposter syndrome, not feeling like you are good enough, and stress, all came from personal experiences, so it wasn’t very hard for me to write about her and put myself in her shoes. But I do think that chess gave me my love of psychology because I became so interested in what players think and how they react, and their likes and dislikes, so I think that gave me my interest in psychology at a very young age.
What is one thing you want female readers to take away from your story? What insight do you have for girls today?
I would hope they realize that no matter what people say about them, that those words reflect more on that person and their insecurities and not on us, and that it is going to be hard because people are always going to be saying horrible things. All we have to do is focus on our own journey and try to block out the noise as much as possible. It shouldn’t be our responsibility to try to withstand the pressure. I think that my book is important for boys to read [as well], because sometimes we all harbor unfair stereotypes about other people.
Do you think that the plot of your novel was the way you expected it to turn out?
Good question. This is my third book, but it is my first book for younger readers. Writing for children is so much harder than writing for adults-when I was writing the first draft of my novel, I was 21 and hadn’t been a child for many years. I was already a very cynical adult, but I had to capture the youthful essence of a child, so that was quite challenging. When I was first writing the book, I wasn’t thinking about getting published, so the first draft was actually quite vulnerable and raw. But when I realized that this would be a book read by other people, I had to go back and dial down the vulnerability so that I wouldn’t feel so exposed when people read it. This was the book that took me the longest to write-it took me almost four years.
What steps did you take to win the Forbes under thirty award? That’s a huge accomplishment!
Thank you! Well, I didn’t really have to take any steps. Forbes just reached out to me-I didn’t know how they’d heard of me. At that time, it was just a short listing process, so them reaching out didn’t really mean anything. I didn’t think much about it, because I was working on another book at the time. I heard the results at the same time as everyone else. My only interaction with them was answering one email to confirm factual information.
What advice do you have for women who are interested in chess?
Find your community-there will be awful people in every sport that you try, so you should try to find people who will stick with you, which will make the experience more enjoyable. Try to find things in chess that spark joy in you-you might not like every part about it-some might be stressful at times-but try to do what you like. If you like playing chess, but not competing, you don’t have to compete. If you like practicing tactics, but not endgames, that’s alright, too.
What advice would you give to somebody who is very interested in writing?
Firstly, your first draft is probably going to be horrible — but that’s expected and completely fine. For May The Best Player Win, the draft that got published was my eighth draft, which means that I had written seven versions of the story beforehand. I do think that for the first draft, finished is better than perfect. For me, I think that it’s important to get all the words out onto the computer, onto the paper, so that you have something to improve on and build on. Secondly, I think you should get feedback. A lot of feedback. Writing can be a very lonely, solitary activity, and ultimately we all have blind spots, so it’s important to get somebody else to tell you what they like about the book and what they think could be better.
Was there a specific moment or year that sparked the idea for “May The Best Player Win,” or was it just based on a broad overview of your years in chess?
I don’t really think so, but one moment that made me pull the trigger was National Novel Writing Month in November. I heard about it in 2020, and since it was the pandemic, I knew that nobody was really going anywhere. So I started writing May The Best Player Win, on November 1st. On the last day of November, I finished writing my first draft. This was the push I really needed to start writing.
If the pandemic, one of your key inspirations for writing, hadn’t come along, would you have written the novel?
I don’t even think I would have thought about writing. If the pandemic hadn’t come along, I would still be in my college dorm, surrounded by people. I would still be afraid to try something new because I might fail, and people might know I failed, so I wouldn’t have tried anything different. So since I was alone during the pandemic, I felt like I could try something new, and even if I wasn’t good at it and I had to stop halfway, it would be okay, because no one would know. So I think I took it step by step, and that was the best approach for me at the time.
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Kyla Zhao’s empowering words made me feel her value for writing and communication. She used writing to channel her emotions into something more and more powerful—creating the book we love, May The Best Player Win. I hope that Kyla’s words inspired you, too, as they definitely inspired me to continue writing! Thank you for reading this interview. Hopefully, it was able to give you an inside view of Kyla’s experience writing her incredible story.