Ma was born in Sanming, Fujian, China,^[5] initially an only child because of China's "one-child policy."^[6] She grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas.^[7] She has an AB from the University of Chicago and received an MFA from Cornell University.^[8]

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."^[9] Severance is a novel that is partially post-apocalyptic horror, and partially office satire.^[10] It follows the novel's narrator in the aftermath of the outbreak of a deadly fever that has killed almost everyone in the US.^[11] An earlier chapter from the book won a 2015 Disquiet Literary Prize, the Graywolf Prize.^[12]

Ma began the novel while working as a fact checker for Playboy, a job she held from 2009 to 2012.^[13] 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.^[14] She took four years to write it,^[10] and finished the novel at Cornell as part of the work in her MFA program.^[15] Ma said she "felt pressured to write a traditional immigration novel" while in the MFA program at Cornell, but instead decided to write about otherness and alienation via the trope of zombie apocalypse.^[7]

Ma has also published short stories in Granta, Playboy, and the Chicago Reader.^[16] Ma's short story "Peking Duck" appears in the 2022 The New Yorker Fiction Issue.^[17] Her first collection of short stories, Bliss Montage, was published in September 2022.^[18] The collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction.^[19]

She is the recipient of a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction.^[20]

• Ma, Ling (2018). Severance: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374261597.
• Ma, Ling (2022). Bliss Montage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374293512.

• Personal website