This is 10-year-old Adora Svitak. She's American-Chinese, her mother originally from Sichuan Province, and her father's family from the Czech Republic.
Svitak is already a published author with Flying Fingers, a compilation of her stories that she launched in Vietnam recently.
The bright girl started writing almost six years ago, putting pencil to paper, but her output of stories increased exponentially after she got a laptop and began typing up to 60 words a minute.
Seattle television station Komo 4 did a story on her and then she was soon on the interview circuit with Diane Sawyer and Oprah Winfrey.
And in all her interviews, Svitak is poised, very mature, and easily comes up with an answer for every question.
She obviously loves reading and writing, having read some 2,000 books and could practically write non-stop, using everything around her as inspiration. And she tries to spread her passion to other children, even carrying a power point presentation on her sticker-covered laptop to teach kids how to write.
Her mother Joyce is anxious for her child to get as much exposure as possible. She explained Svitak raised US$30,000 in Vietnam for needy children to buy books and her daughter was written about in all the newspapers there.
What's also interesting is that this morning Svitak and her mom paid a visit to New Oriental, a Chinese company that specializes in teaching English. They are currently in talks to possibly use the literary prodigy's teaching methods.
So while the girl from Redmond, Washington may claim she's basically an ordinary kid, she has big ambitions -- to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Her publicity campaign has already started.
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1 comment:
the chinese seem to have pretty good gene pools. in hong kong not too long ago there was a 9 year old mathematics prodigy. now this literary genius is another reason we should proud of ourselves. but she needs to live a normal kiddy life. i worry that most proidgies have short lives. hope she beats the odds.
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