Ling Ma
Ma in 2023
Born	Sanming, Fujian, China
Occupation(s)	Writer, professor
Known for	Severance
Awards	Kirkus Prize; Windham-Campbell Literature Prize; Story Prize
Academic work
Institutions	University of Chicago

Ling Ma is a Chinese American novelist and assistant professor of practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Severance, won a 2018 Kirkus Prize and was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 ^[1] and shortlisted for the 2019 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. ^[2] Her second book, Bliss Montage, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Story Prize. ^{[3] [4]}

Early life

Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian, China, ^[5] initially an only child because of China's " one-child policy." ^[6] She grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. ^[7] She has an AB from the University of Chicago and received an MFA from Cornell University. ^[8]

Career

Ma's debut novel, Severance, is described as "a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after, but that doesn’t mean it’s a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment." ^[9] Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror, and partially office satire. ^[10] It follows the novel's narrator in the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly fever that has killed almost everyone in the US. ^[11] An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize, the Graywolf Prize. ^[12]

Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for Playboy, a job she held from 2009 to 2012. ^[13] It began as a short story, written in her office during her last few months there; after her layoff, it became a novel which she wrote while living on severance pay. ^[14] She took four years to write it, ^[10] and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program. ^[15] Ma said she "felt pressured to write a traditional immigration novel" while in the MFA program at Cornell, but instead decided to write about otherness and alienation via the trope of zombie apocalypse. ^[7]

Ma has also published short stories in Granta, Playboy, and the Chicago Reader. ^[16] Ma's short story "Peking Duck" appears in the 2022 The New Yorker Fiction Issue. ^[17] Her first collection of short stories, Bliss Montage, was published in September 2022. ^[18] The collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. ^[19]

She is the recipient of a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction. ^[20]

Works

• Ma, Ling (2018). Severance: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN  9780374261597.
• Ma, Ling (2022). Bliss Montage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN  9780374293512.

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Ling Ma.

• Personal website