Ling Ma

Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian, China, an only child because of China's "one-child policy".[3][4] She grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas.[5] She has an AB from the University of Chicago and received an MFA from Cornell University.[6]

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."[7] Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror, and partially office satire.[8] It follows the novel's narrator in the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly fever that has killed almost everyone in the US.[9] An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize, the Graywolf Prize.[10]

Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for Playboy, a job she held from 2009 to 2012.[11] 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.[12] She took four years to write it[8], and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program.[13] She said that she watched George Romero films while working on Severance, and also The Walking Dead[8].

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.[5] 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."[14]

Ma has also published short stories in Granta, Playboy, and the Chicago Reader.[15]

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