A 13-year-old Chinese girl, Fan Yi, also called Nancy, recently published her first fairy tale, Swordbird. The English fairy tale appeared on the bestseller list for children's fiction in the US, the Shanghai Evening Post reported.

Fan Yi has been greatly interested in observing birds ever since she was a little girl. In Hamilton, New York, where she lives, she often watches kingfishers and woodpeckers flying over her house from the small woods nearby.

The inspiration for writing the book Swordbird actually came from one of her dreams. At that time she was studying American history in school and read many articles in magazines about the September 11th terrorist attacks. One day soon after, she had a dream in which some rosefinches and bluejays were manipulated by some black birds and began to fight with each other. When she woke up, she decided to turn her dream into a story and to convey her message for peace to the public.

In order to get her book published in China, Fan translated the entire English version into Chinese.

"It is a learning process. Since I didn't know many Chinese idioms, I had to get help from my mom and dad from time to time. For another thing, a lot of poems in the original story are written in rhyme. So when I translated them into Chinese, I wanted to make sure that they were in rhyme, too," she said.

Fan Yi was born in Beijing in 1993. She stayed in Beijing until she finished her first grade of elementary school, then she moved with her parents to the United States when she was seven. Two years later, she started to write her English story.

The book was published by Harper Collins Publishers in March of this year. It was selected as the week's bestseller of children's fiction by the New York Times soon after it was published.

In the future, Fan Yi might write more books for a Swordbird series. It is expected that her Swordbird Prelude might come off the press next year.

(Chinanews.cn April 6, 2007)