Lisa Ko
Poets & Writers Magazine|July - August 2017

whose debut novel, The Leavers, winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize, was published in May by Algonquin Books.

Emily Raboteau
Lisa Ko

I HAD the pleasure of watching the seed planted for Lisa Ko’s power-ful novel, The Leavers, in the form of a short story she wrote for a creative writing workshop I taught many years ago at the City College of New York. Last year the book won the PEN/ Bellwether Prize, awarded by novelist Barbara King solver for a novel that addresses social justice. The $25,000 prize includes a publishing contract. The main plot of The Leavers follows a lost young man in his search to find his mom, an undocumented Chinese immigrant who disappeared when he was eleven years old, after which he was adopted by a white family.

How did “Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo,” an article by journalist Nina Bernstein in the New York Times, inspire your novel?

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