A Utah-raised author was recently awarded an $800,000 fellowship for her body of work, which brings realistic emotions into surreal situations.
Ling Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian, China, but moved to Salt Lake City when she was a child — an area she said was surprisingly diverse.
“Many of the sort of foreign scholars lived in those complexes,” Ma said. “And so my friends were from Iran, they were from Russia, and obviously they were from Taiwan, a bunch of other Chinese immigrants as well.”
She had been writing most of her life, but she didn’t consider it could be a career until she got laid off from an office job as a fact checker for Playboy Magazine.
“I thought I would have a novel in me and write it when I was maybe retired or something,” Ma said. “But I got into fiction writing because I got laid off and decided I would write a novel.”
Since that shift in 2012, Ma has written almost a dozen short stories, a novel, and a short story collection, garnering her awards like the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her work covers topics like relationship dynamics, work and labor, and the idea of the immigrant success story, often through the lens of science fiction and horror.
“With my fiction in general, someone said to me that it's marked by emotional realism, but very surreal premise,” Ma said.
Even 13 years into this career, however, Ma said she's still surprised by which themes crop up most often in her stories.
“To be honest, I feel like I'm still kind of learning about myself as a fiction writer,” she said. “I think the work that I produce tells me what my interests are, and I don't always know right off the bat.”
In her first novel, “Severance,” Ma’s themes were even more topical than intended. It tells the story of an office worker’s life after a worldwide pandemic turned millions of people into husks of their former selves — and Ma finished writing it in 2016.
“I think if I had written it maybe later ... I wonder if it would have been more absurd,” Ma said. “Encountering something as seemingly science fiction as like a pandemic has, I think, changed our relationship with absurdity and what we accept as plausible.”
After publishing her short story collection “Bliss Montage” in 2022, Ling Ma is now writing her third book, a novel she’d originally abandoned years ago.
“The characters are somewhat different, and even the situation is somewhat different, but I find that I'm asking very similar questions,” Ma said. “And so I think in some way, that abandoned novel has come back to haunt me again.”
Late last year, Ma became one of 22 MacArthur Fellows, each of whom are given $800,000 no-strings-attached fellowships for their original, inventive work in a variety of fields.
MacArthur Fellows are chosen through external nominations rather than an application, so when Ma got the call, she thought they were calling about someone she had nominated, not herself.
“So I thought, oh, I'd better get in gear about ... you know, make a case for this other person,” Ma said. “But when they told me, it was very—I was shocked.”
She said that while the money does make a tangible difference, she’s still on the same trajectory for what she wants to do and how she wants to live her life.
“As a writer ... I think it's important to live like the way that everyone else lives,” Ma said. “I try to keep anchoring myself in just the minutia of daily life, of being in one place, of being in, I guess, my life.”
“I don't want to drift too far away from that,” she added.
