In her third chapter, she writes of her mother, Vjollca Veli*:
I've not been able to find any trace of Vjollca Veli's chess at all. No Chessgames entry, no useful Google results by searching her name in connection with chess or even shehu. Albania don't seem to have fielded a women's team in Olympiads (nor would she have been allowed to travel if they had, for reasons the book eventually makes clear) and she is not listed on Wikipedia under Chess in Albania.At twenty-two, she became the national chess champion, and defended the title for a few years.
Nor, intriguingly, does she seem to appear in a list of Albanian chess champions - but the list, for women, only goes back to 1977. While I don't know her mother's age, Ypi herself was born in 1979, and it's presumably quite possible that the events concerned could have been some years before her birth.
So what, if anything is known about Vjollca Veli and her chess? When did she win her national championships?
[* the reviewer here writes that she "went by Doli", which I missed in the book and which may complicate things.]