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Sapphic romance

Malinda Lo

born 1974

Author of Ash, a sapphic Cinderella, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club.

Born
1974 · China
Nationality
American
  • young adult
  • fairy-tale retelling
  • historical romance
  • Cinderella
  • San Francisco

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Malinda Lo, their publishers or their estate. Malinda Lo appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Malinda Lo is an American writer of young-adult novels. She was born in China and moved to the United States at the age of three; she graduated from Wellesley College, took a master's degree in Regional Studies from Harvard, and left Stanford's anthropology programme with a second master's. She also researches diversity in young-adult literature and publishing.

Her first novel, Ash (2009), reworks Cinderella with a lesbian heroine, and her later fantasy and science-fiction books include Huntress, Adaptation and Inheritance. Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021), a historical romance about a Chinese American teenager discovering her sexuality in 1950s San Francisco, is her best-known book.

Works

Major works

  1. 2009Asha lesbian reworking of Cinderella; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
  2. 2011Huntress
  3. 2012Adaptation
  4. 2013Inheritancethe sequel to Adaptation
  5. 2017A Line in the Dark
  6. 2021Last Night at the Telegraph Clubset in San Francisco's Chinatown during the McCarthy-era Red Scare; won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 2009

    Published her first novel, Ash, which was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award and the Lambda Literary Award, among others.

  2. 2013

    Served on the faculty of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Writer Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices.

  3. 2018

    Wrote the short story that became Last Night at the Telegraph Club, for an anthology of queer teen stories.

  4. 2021

    Published Last Night at the Telegraph Club on 19 January.

  5. 2022

    Named by Carnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Awards.

Why they are here

Malinda Lo and the shelf

Relevance

Ash is one of the best-known fairy-tale retellings with a lesbian heroine, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a major historical sapphic romance: a love story that is also the story of queer life in Chinese American San Francisco before Stonewall.

Influence

Her books have brought sapphic stories to a young-adult readership and to the major awards for young people's literature.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Malinda Lo, and they are not a recommendation on Malinda Lo’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Malinda Lo is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.