Ken Liu is an American sci-fi and fantasy author, translator of speculative fiction, lawyer, and programmer. He won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. Liu published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons. He has also won top genre honors abroad in Japan, Spain, and France.
Ken Liu was born 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.
Liu graduated from Waterford High School, where he ran cross-country and track. He studied English Literature and Computer Science At Harvard College.
Before becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on different topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, the history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.
Ken’s debut novel is The Grace of Kings (2015), the first in the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity.
He also released a collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016). It has been published in over a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020) includes stories featured in Pantheon—now an animated series on AMC+. He also penned the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.
In addition to his original fiction, Ken is the translator of numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel to ever receive that honor.
Recent projects include The Message, under development by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment; Good Hunting, adapted as an episode in season one of Netflix’s breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots.
Ken Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Photo credit: kenliu.name
