Lydia Kang

Lydia Kang was born in Baltimore, Maryland.[1][2] She graduated from Roland Park Country School in 1989[3] and received her BA from Columbia University.[4] She was a research assistant at the Columbia University Department of Biology during her undergraduate years and in graduate school.[5] She received her MD from New York University Grossman School of Medicine in 1998.[6] After completing a primary care internal medicine residency at New York University's Langone Department of Medicine, she served as chief resident from 2001 to 2002[7] before staying on as an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital.[8] In 2006, she moved to Omaha, Nebraska with her family and is an assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.[9] She is of Korean descent.[10]

In 2009, she joined the writing workshop The Seven Doctors Project at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.[11][12] After writing two novels, she sold her third, a young adult science fiction novel, Control, to Penguin Random House in 2011[13][14] which subsequently released in 2013. The sequel, Catalyst, was published in 2015.[15] In 2017, she released three more books, A Beautiful Poison, Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (co-written with Nate Pedersen),[16][17][18] and The November Girl.[19] The November Girl won a 2018 Nebraska Best Book Award for Young Adult Literature.[20] Quackery was a Science Friday Best Science Book of 2017.[21] Her young adult novel, Toxic, was published in 2018 and was a YARWA Athena Award winner for speculative fiction and a Junior Library Guild selection.[22] She also published three more adult historical fiction novels including The Impossible Girl[23] in 2018, Opium and Absinthe in 2020,[24] and The Half-Life of Ruby Fielding in 2022.[25] Her second co-written nonfiction book, Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Disease, was published in 2021 and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.[26] Her novel, Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases, co-authored with Nate Pedersen, is the 2022 winner of the Nebraska Book Award in the NonFiction Popular History category.[27]

Her writing is included in the young adult anthology, Color Outside the Lines: Stories about Love.[28] Her short story, Right-Hand Man, is included in the 2020 anthology From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, which describes the critical scene in The Empire Strikes Back in which 2-1B attached Luke Skywalker's prosthetic hand.[29] In 2022, StarWars.com announced the addition of Kang to their Phase II multimedia project[30] for the novel, Cataclysm.[31]

She has frequently helped other writers with medical accuracy in their fiction.[32] She has also published poetry and essays in JAMA,[33] The Canadian Medical Association Journal,[34][35] Flatwater Free Press,[36] Journal of General Internal Medicine,[37] The Annals of Internal Medicine,[38] Great Weather for Media,[39] and the Linden Review.[40]

Young Adult Novels

• Control (Dial Books, Penguin Random House, 2013)
• Catalyst (Kathy Dawson Books, Penguin Random House, 2013)
• The November Girl (Entangled Publishing, 2017)
• Toxic (Entangled Publishing, 2018)

Short Stories

• Yuna and the Wall in Color Outside the Lines: Stories about Love (Soho Press, 2019)
• The Right-Hand Man in Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back (Random House Worlds, 2020)

Adult Novels

• A Beautiful Poison (Lake Union Publishing, 2017)
• The Impossible Girl (Lake Union Publishing, 2018)
• Opium and Absinthe: A Novel (Lake Union Publishing, 2020)
• The Half-Life of Ruby Fielding (Lake Union Publishing, 2022)
• Star Wars: Cataclysm (Del Rey Books, forthcoming)

Adult Nonfiction

• Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (Workman Publishing, 2017)
• Patient Zero (Workman Publishing, 2022)