Ling Ma is a Chinese American novelist and professor at the University of Chicago.

[9] 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.

[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.

[17] Ma's short story "Peking Duck" appears in the 2022 The New Yorker Fiction Issue.