Lisa Ko is an American writer, born in 1975 in New York City to Filipino immigrants of Chinese descent. Ko started writing in early childhood, drawing her first inspiration from observations she made at her family’s flea market and crafts show stands in New Jersey. In 2002, Ko was a founding member and the first books editor for Hyphen, an Asian-American literary magazine.
The Leavers is her debut novel. It was published in 2017, after winning the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for both the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel was also named best book of the year by NPR and Oprah Magazine.
According to Ko, The Leavers was inspired by the story of an undocumented immigrant woman who lost the rights to her own child after being detained as an illegal immigrant, that was published in 2009 in the New York Times. Ko wrote the novel over the span of several years while working a number of different jobs and has revealed that she hadn’t thought the novel was completely finished when she sent it in to the competition.
