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]
Ling Ma | |
|---|---|
_(cropped).jpg) 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 |
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
