Malinda Lo – Chinese American novelist, author of Ash and Last Night at the Telegraph Club. She broke new ground by weaving fairy tales with lesbian love stories, giving YA literature a bold, lyrical voice. Growing up between Hong Kong and the U.S., she carried that sense of dual belonging into her fiction. Her work is tender yet daring, always circling back to love, identity, and defiance.
📖 Ash was hailed as a lesbian retelling of Cinderella. 🌸 Last Night at the Telegraph Club won the U.S. National Book Award. 🌍 She grew up between two cultures, a theme pulsing through her characters. 🖊️ Before fiction, she worked as a journalist covering science and culture. 📚 Her novels helped open the YA shelves to LGBTQ+ stories. 🎬 Film rights for Ash have been optioned multiple times. 💡 She blends myth and modernity with unusual grace. 📖 Her heroines are always rewriting their own fates. ⚡ As a child, she devoured books sitting on the floor of bookstores. 😮 She once admitted she feared writing openly about identity. 🙂 She laughs now remembering when publishers said: “Those books won’t sell.”