Ling Ma

Ling Ma was born in Fujian, China, and moved to the United States as a child, growing up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. A writer and associate professor at the University of Chicago, where she teaches creative writing, Ma’s work often explores issues of the female body, labor, capitalism, and the Chinese American diaspora.

Before turning to fiction, Ma worked in media and publishing. After being laid off as fact checker from Playboy when the Chicago office closed, she began writing her debut novel while living on severance. She finished it while completing her MFA at Cornell University.

In 2018, she released Severance, a novel that is part post-apocalyptic horror and part office satire. It follows a young Chinese American woman working in publishing as she navigates the aftermath of a deadly outbreak. Widely acclaimed, it was named a New York Times Notable Book and awarded the 2018 Kirkus Prize. Ma followed it in 2022 with her short story collection Bliss Montage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

While Ma’s work often examines themes of otherness and alienation, she has pushed back against pressure to focus on traditional immigration stories.

“I felt there was this cultural expectation to write about your otherness — to explain yourself,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “I had grown up mostly in white America and often got asked where I came from. Writing an immigration novel was answering and I wasn’t interested.” Nevertheless, immigrant stories often appear in unusual or subverted ways in her work. As she told PBS’s American Masters: Creative Spark, “Maybe I was trying to write that type of story, but implode it from the inside.”

Ma has also received a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, the Story Prize, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, a Whiting Award, and other honors for her work.

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan. Published June 2026