# Ken Liu

Ken Liu (born 1976) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his novel translations and original short fiction, which has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's Science Fiction, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and multiple "Year's Best" anthologies.
Liu has also written an epic fantasy novel series, The Dandelion Dynasty, which he describes as silkpunk. The series is published by Simon & Schuster.

## Childhood and career

Liu was born in 1976 in Lanzhou, China. He spent his childhood with his grandparents. His mother, who received her Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States, is a pharmaceutical chemist, while his father is a computer engineer. The family immigrated to the United States when Liu was 11 years old. They lived in California and Stonington, Connecticut before settling in Waterford, Connecticut. Liu graduated from Waterford High School in 1994, where he ran cross-country and track. At Harvard College, he studied English Literature and Computer Science, receiving his A. B. in 1998.
After graduation, Liu worked as a software engineer for Microsoft, and then joined a start-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2004 and after working as a corporate lawyer, eventually became a high-tech litigation consultant.
Liu began publishing fiction in 2002. His first published work was "Carthaginian Rose", a short story on mind uploading, which was published alongside nine other authors in The Phobos Science Fiction Anthology Volume 1.
Liu has said he wanted to become a writer so he could make stories that “turn values upside down and inside out to gain new perspectives”.
After a long career writing and publishing short fiction, Liu turned to epic fantasy novels, starting with The Grace of Kings (2015). He has also written for the Star Wars universe, with The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017).
Along with his original work, Liu has translated the works of multiple Chinese authors into English, including Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang, Chen Qiufan, and Xia Jia. His translation of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin helped the book become a best seller to English readers. He has also worked as an editor. While editing the anthology Invisible Planets, Ken Liu translated the stories contained within it from Chinese into English.
Some of Liu's work have been adapted into visual media. His short story "Memories of My Mother" was the basis of Beautiful Dreamer (2016) by David Gaddie. His short story "Real Artists" was adapted into the short film Real Artists (2017) by Cameo Wood. His short story "Good Hunting", which has at its core the consequences of rapid urbanisation of the Chinese landscape and the subsequent erosion of the qi from the soil, was adapted into an animated short as part of Netflix's Love, Death & Robots series (2019). Several of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories were adapted for the animated television series Pantheon.
Liu's short story collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020) explores ideas such as tradition and progress, the fallibility of memory, and the essence of what it means to be human. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Liu was disturbed by finger-pointing, jingoism, and xenophobia in the face of what he saw as an existential, global threat; he began to seek solace in the Tao Te Ching and subsequently released a new translation of the ancient text, Laozi's Dao De Jing: A New Interpretation for a Transformative Time (2024).
Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

## Awards

Liu's short story "The Paper Menagerie" is the first work of fiction, of any length, to win all of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. In addition, his short story, "Mono no aware" won the 2013 Hugo Award, and his novella "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" was also nominated for a Hugo. The first novel in his The Dandelion Dynasty series, The Grace of Kings, was a 2016 Nebula Award finalist. The novel was the 2016 Locus Award Best First Novel winner.
Besides his original work, Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's Chinese language novel The Three-Body Problem (the first in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy) won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, making it the first translated novel to have won the award. Liu also translated the third volume of the Remembrance of Earth's Past series, Death's End, in 2016, which was a 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist.
One of Liu's short stories, "Thoughts and Prayers", is a part of Jonathan Strahan's The Year's Best Science Fiction (2020), Vol 1.

### Winner

* 2012 Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards, Short Form winner, translation from the Chinese of "The Fish of Lijiang" by Chen Qiufan
* 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, winner, "The Paper Menagerie"
* 2012 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, winner, "The Paper Menagerie"
* 2012 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, winner, "The Paper Menagerie"
* 2013 FantLab's Book of the Year Award for Best Online Publication in Small Form', winner, "The Paper Menagerie"
* 2013 FantLab's Book of the Year Award for Best Translated Novella or Short Story, winner, "Mono no aware"
* 2013 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, winner, "Mono no aware"
* 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, winner, "The Three-Body Problem (三体)" by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
* 2015 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, winner, "The Long Haul: From the Annals of Transportation, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009"
* 2016 Locus Award for Best First Novel, winner, The Grace of Kings
* 2017 Locus Award for Best Collection, winner, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
* 2017 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, winner, "Death's End" by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu

### Finalists and nominated

* 2011 Nebula Award for Best Novella, nominee, "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary"
* 2012 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, nominee, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species"
* 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, nominee, "The Waves"
* 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novella, nominee, "All the Flavors"
* 2012 Theodore Sturgeon Award, finalist, "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" and "The Paper Menagerie"
* 2012 Locus Award for Best Short Story, finalist, "The Paper Menagerie"
* 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novella, nominee, "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary"
* 2013 Locus Award for Best Short Story, finalist, "Mono no aware"
* 2013 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, nominee, "The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
* 2013 Theodore Sturgeon Award, finalist, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" and "Mono no aware"
* 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel, nominee, "The Three-Body Problem (三体)" by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
* 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novella, nominee, "The Regular"
* 2014 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, nominee, "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel"
* 2014 Locus Award for Best Short Story, finalist, "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel"
* 2015 Locus Award for Best Novella, finalist, "The Regular"
* 2015 Theodore Sturgeon Award, finalist, "The Regular"
* 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel, finalist, Death's End by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu
* 2017 World Fantasy Award, nominee, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Best Collection
* 2020 Locus Award for Best Short Story, finalist, "Thoughts and Prayers"