Photo by Scott R. Kline
Born in Mianyang, China and raised in Montana and Southern California, Irving Ruan is a Chinese American fiction writer, TV writer, software engineer, and former startup founder.
After graduating from the University of California, San Diego with a B.S. in Computer Science, he spent a decade in Silicon Valley building software and consulting for places like Blue Origin, Apple, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Named by Paste Magazine as one of the best humorists writing today, Irving is a contributing writer for The New Yorker magazine. His writing has appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Funny Or Die, CollegeHumor, Hyphen Magazine, The Bold Italic, and elsewhere. He is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and his work has been included in The New Yorker’s best Shouts & Murmurs of 2019, 2020, and 2021.
A selection of Irving’s writing has been anthologized in McSweeney’s 21st anniversary collection, Keep Scrolling Till You Feel Something, as well as McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue No. 53, which won the 2019 National Magazine Award in Fiction.
Irving is an alum of the improv, sketch writing, and satire program at The Second City in Chicago, a 2021 Tracking Board/Next List Selectee, a 2021-2022 Fellow in the WarnerMedia/HBO Access Writing Fellowship, and a member of the WGA.
Most recently, he was a writer on Twisted Metal (Sony/Peacock).
Irving lives in Los Angeles, CA.