Ling Ma

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Ling Ma
File:LMa at table (cropped).jpg
Ma in 2024
Born
OccupationsWriter, professor
Known forSeverance
AwardsKirkus Prize; Windham-Campbell Literature Prize; Story Prize
Academic background
EducationUniversity of Chicago (AB)
Cornell University (MFA)
Academic work
InstitutionsUniversity of Chicago

Ling Ma is a Chinese American novelist and professor at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Severance (2018), won a 2018 Kirkus Prize and was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018[1] and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award.[2] Her second book, Bliss Montage (2022), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Story Prize.[3][4] She is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.[5]

Early life

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Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian, China,[6] initially an only child because of China's "one-child policy."[7] She grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas.[8] She has an AB from the University of Chicago and received an MFA from Cornell University.[9]

Career

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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."[10] Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror, and partially office satire.[11] It follows the novel's narrator in the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly fever that has killed almost everyone in the US.[12] An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize, the Graywolf Prize.[13]

Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for Playboy, a job she held from 2009 to 2012.[14] 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.[15] She took four years to write it,[11] and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program.[16] 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.[8]

Ma has also published short stories in Granta, Playboy, and the Chicago Reader.[17] Ma's short story "Peking Duck" appears in the 2022 The New Yorker Fiction Issue.[18] Her first collection of short stories, Bliss Montage, was published in September 2022.[19] The collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.[20]

She is the recipient of a 2023 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction.[21]

Works

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Books

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Stories

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Year Title Publication Collected in
2012 "The Scientist" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
"Yeti Lovemaking" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value). Bliss Montage
2014 "Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value). from Severance
2015 "Los Angeles" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value). Bliss Montage
2020 "G" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
2022 "Office Hours" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
"Tomorrow" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
"Peking Duck" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
"Oranges"
"Returning"
2023 "Winner" Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).

References

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  17. ^ Day, Madeline (2018-08-22). "Apocalyptic Office Novel: An Interview with Ling Ma Archived 2019-01-23 at the Wayback Machine". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2019-01-23.
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