Ken Liu

Ken Liu (born 1976) is a Chinese-American science-fiction writer, poet, lawyer and computer programmer. His short stories have appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and other magazines, as well as several anthologies, including the Year's Best SF. He is also a translator of science fiction and literary stories from Chinese into English, including Lui Cixin's Nebula-nominated The Three-Body Problem. His 2011 short story "The Paper Menagerie" is the first work of fiction, of any length, to have swept the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. Professor, author and editor Betsy Huang says of Liu: "A distinctive quality of Liu's fiction is his persistent concern with the implications of cultural miscommunication, often the unhappy result of ineffectual translations. The Nebula- and Hugo-nominated stories, as well as stories like Five Elements of the Heart Mind, The Literomancer, and Saving Face, are all fine examples of Liu's efforts to translate across cultures and histories, and to introduce more finely-tuned and complex representations of Asia and Asians into a genre with a fraught Orientalist history." Liu's debut novel The Grace of Kings is scheduled to be released in 2015. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.