Malinda Lo Books in Order

Malinda Lo was born in Guangzhou, China, and came to the United States with her family when she was three and a half. She grew up near Boulder, Colorado, in a household where music, study, and hard work all mattered. Her mother had been a professional pianist in China, then rebuilt her working life in America, and that family history seems to echo through Lo's fiction, where identity is rarely simple and starting over is never easy.

She wanted to write early. Really early.

Lo wrote her first novel at thirteen, then kept going, turning out fantasy manuscripts as a teenager just to see what stories she could build. But wanting to write and trusting writing as a job were two different things. At Wellesley College she studied Economics and Chinese Studies, then went on to Harvard for a master's degree in East Asian Studies and later to Stanford for graduate work in cultural anthropology.

The turn toward fiction came slowly, and then all at once. After college she moved to New York and worked as an editorial assistant at Random House, which gave her a close look at publishing without convincing her she wanted to stay on the editorial side. Later, while at Stanford, she realized graduate school was taking her farther from the life she actually wanted. She has written that after 9/11, which hit especially close because of her New York years, she started asking herself what she really wanted to make. The answer was a novel.

That book became Ash, her 2009 debut, a Cinderella retelling where the emotional center belongs to Ash and the king's huntress, Kaisa. It set out several things that would keep showing up in Lo's work: queer girls at the center of the story, fantasy that takes feeling seriously, and characters trying to figure out who they are without turning that question into a lecture. Huntress followed as a companion novel in the same world, widening the map and deepening her interest in myth, duty, and first love.

She does not stay in one lane for long.

The Adaptation books moved into science fiction, giving readers alien contact, government secrecy, and a San Francisco teen named Reese Holloway trying to make sense of danger, desire, and a body that has been changed without her consent. Then A Line in the Dark took a darker turn into contemporary suspense, mixing friendship, obsession, class tension, and murder. Lo likes genre, but she tends to use it as a way to get closer to character, not farther away from it.

Her best known novel may be Last Night at the Telegraph Club, set in 1954 San Francisco's Chinatown during the Red Scare. Through Lily Hu's first love and her family's fear of being targeted, Lo brings together queer history, Chinese American life, and the everyday bravery of wanting more than the world thinks you should have. The book won the National Book Award, along with several other major honors. She followed it with A Scatter of Light, a present-day coming-of-age novel that returns to California and quietly echoes the earlier book across generations.

Before fiction became her main path, Lo spent years in journalism and LGBT media. She wrote about entertainment and culture, became managing editor of AfterEllen, and won the Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for Excellence in LGBT Journalism in 2006. Now she lives in Massachusetts with her wife and their dog. Across fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, and historical fiction, she keeps returning to people who are finding language for themselves, and then testing what that truth will cost.