Ling Ma

Ling Ma is a Chinese American novelist and professor whose first book, Severance won a 2018 Kirkus Prize as well as being listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and shortlisted for the 2019 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Ma was born in Sanming, China, an only child because of China's "one-child policy". She grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. She has an AB from the University of Chicago and received an MFA from Cornell University.

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." Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror, and partially office satire. It follows the novel's narrator after the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly viral fever that has killed almost everyone in the US. An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize, the Graywolf Prize.

Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for Playboy, a job she held from 2009 to 2012. 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. She took four years to write it, and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program. She said that she watched George Romero films while working on Severance, and also The Walking Dead.

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. Ma's main character is, like her, a first generation immigrant. The New York Times review states that "laced within its dystopian narrative is an encapsulation of a first-generation immigrant’s nostalgia for New York."

Ma has also published short stories in Granta, Playboy, and the Chicago Reader.

Ma is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago.