Antoaneta Stefanova

Antoaneta Stefanova, born in Sofia in 1979, is a Bulgarian chess grandmaster who was Women's World Chess Champion from 2004 to 2006. Her father taught her the game at four, she won the girls under-10 section at the 1989 World Youth Chess Festival in Puerto Rico, and at thirteen she played her first Chess Olympiad, in Manila in 1992. She won the Bulgarian women's championship in 1995 and the European individual women's championship in Varna in 2002, and in July 2002 FIDE made her a grandmaster, the ninth woman to reach that rank. In June 2004 she won a 64-player knockout tournament in Elista to become world champion. She later won the Women's World Rapid Chess Championship in 2012 and was runner-up in the 2012 Women's World Chess Championship, losing the final to Anna Ushenina on tie-break. She has played for Bulgaria at the Women's Chess Olympiad since 1992, captained the Bulgarian women's team that won the European championship in November 2023, and in 2021 was elected to parliament for the party There Is Such a People.