Lisa Ko’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, among others. Ko’s powerful debut, a nominee for the National Book Award in Fiction, The Leavers (Algonquin Books) is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice. Set in New York and China, The Leavers follows one young man’s search for his mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant who disappears when he’s 11 years old, after which he is adopted by a white family. It’s the story of one mother and her son: what brings them together and takes them apart. Ann Patchett writes, “. . . if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading.”
