Malinda Lo | |
|---|---|
 Lo at the 2017 Texas Book Festival | |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 2009–present |
| Genre | Young adult, fantasy, science fiction |
| Relatives | Ruth Earnshaw Lo (grandmother) |
| Website | |
| www | |
Malinda Lo is an American writer of young adult novels including Ash, Huntress, Adaptation, Inheritance, A Line in the Dark, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club. She also does research on diversity in young adult literature and publishing.
Lo was born in China and moved to the United States at the age of three. She graduated from Wellesley College and earned a master's degree in Regional Studies from Harvard. She enrolled at Stanford with the intention of obtaining a PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology, but left with a second master's degree.[1]
Malinda Lo was made a member of the faculty of the Lambda Literary Foundation's 2013 Writer Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, along with Samuel R. Delany, Sarah Schulman and David Groff.[2]
She resides in Massachusetts with her wife, Amy Lovell.[3][4][5]
Lo began writing for the culture blog AfterEllen in 2003, and at one point served as the managing editor.[6][7]
She was also a contributing writer for Curve magazine from 2005 to 2007, acting as associate editor for a majority of her tenure.[8]
Her first novel, Ash, was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in 2009.[9] Ash was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award, the Andre Norton Award for YA Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.[2] Her second book, Huntress, was published by Little, Brown in 2011.[10] It is set in the same fantasy world as Ash, which mixes East Asian and European influences;[11] it too was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award finalist and for the 2012 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Novel, as well as being judged a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.[2] Her third book, Adaptation, was published in 2012. Reviewers at Kirkus Reviews and elsewhere have compared it favorably to the television program The X-Files.[12] The X-Files was also the subject of Lo's graduate research at Stanford.[1] A sequel to Adaptation, titled Inheritance, was published in 2013.[13]
A stand-alone thriller novel, A Line in the Dark, was published in 2017 and was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus, Vulture, and Chicago Public Library.[14]
In 2021, Lo released the book Last Night at the Telegraph Club, following a teenaged American-born Chinese woman coming to terms with her homosexuality during the McCarthy Red Scare in 1950s San Francisco, adapted from a short story she wrote for the 2018 anthology All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages.[15] She has since written Notes from the Telegraph Club, a series of blogposts about her research for the novel, and described that she chose to use Chinese characters with footnote translations for when the characters are speaking Chinese to each other, partly because the romanization of Chinese was not yet standardized in the 1950s and "Romanized Chinese of the 1950s was for the benefit of non-Chinese Westerners, mostly white people" and partly to make clear the sense of insider versus outsider culture.[15] Last Night at the Telegraph Club was well received, with Kirkus opening their review with "Finally, the intersectional, lesbian, historical teen novel so many readers have been waiting for"[16] and Joanne Zou writing for Farrago that it "struck a very personal chord with me. It is a book full of hope and love and community and gay people, some of my favourite elements in storytelling. I am glad this book exists and it made me glad that I exist."[17] In May 2021, it was announced that Last Night at the Telegraph Club had earned Lo another ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults nomination.[18] In November 2021 her YA Novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club was awarded the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.[19]
Lo followed up Last Night at the Telegraph Club with a standalone companion novel called A Scatter of Light, which was published on October 4, 2022.[20] A coming-of-age story, it is set in 2013, during the time same-sex marriage is legalized in California, a topic which is used to connect the two novels.[21]
In 2011, Malinda Lo co-founded Diversity in YA, a website and book tour to promote and celebrate diverse representations in young adult literature, with fellow young adult author Cindy Pon.[22] Diversity in YA highlights books with characters of color, LGBTQ characters, and disabled characters and collects data on the number of books with diverse characters and authors that are published annually. Starting in 2012, Lo has periodically published analysis of the diversity in Publishers Weekly and New York Times bestselling young adult novels. Her 2013 analysis showed that 15 percent of New York Times bestselling young adult novels featured main characters of color, 12 percent featured LGBT main characters, and three percent had main characters with disabilities.[23]
Ash is also found in Love Bites 2: Arizona / Ash / Blood Ties / The Secret Circle: The Initiation and the Captive (2010)
