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Ling Ma
Chinese American novelist and academic From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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]
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Early life
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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Perspective
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]
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Works
Books
- Ma, Ling (2018). Severance: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374261597.
- Ma, Ling (2022). Bliss Montage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374293512.
Stories
References
External links
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