Malinda Lo
“I’ve always wanted to tell stories,” says Malinda Lo. “When I was growing up, I wrote for myself: stories of escape and imagined adulthood. As I became an adult, I wrote to discover myself.” The New York Times best- selling author burst onto the literary scene in 2009 with her debut novel Ash, a sapphic reimagining of the Cinderella story that was nominated for several honors, including the Lambda Literary Award, and is now considered a queer classic. Her latest novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, has earned wide-spread critical acclaim, winning the Stonewall Book Award, the National Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, among other honors. Lo takes pride in writing for teens, and thinks her work speaks to adult readers as well, especially to those in the LGBTQ+ community. “Because [my books] are about young queer women coming of age, I think they’re for queer women of all ages,” she tells GO. “We’ve all gone through or are going through similar kinds of experiences.” As the acclaimed author, who lives in Massachusetts with her wife and their dog, continues in her career, she finds her artistic vision evolving. “I’m increasingly aware of time, in that I’m not going to have an infinite amount of time to write,” she says. “As I grow older, my interest in the ways we are all connected has deepened, and I’d like to explore that interconnectedness in my fiction.” Lo is “also interested in the cyclical nature of human experience, and how that can be expressed in art, including novels. I hope to write something that can speak to that.” –LE
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