Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin grew up partly in Yangquan, Shanxi, where his father worked in the coal industry, and trained as a computer engineer, spending more than twenty years as a systems engineer at a power plant while writing science fiction on the side. He began publishing short stories in Chinese SF magazines in the 1990s, largely unknown outside a niche readership.

The Three-Body Problem, first of his Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, opens with a Cultural Revolution betrayal and expands into humanity's discovery of an alien civilization bent on invasion. Ken Liu's 2014 English translation won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to do so, and drew public praise from figures including Barack Obama.

The trilogy's global success, and later television adaptations in both China and the West, made him the writer most credited with bringing Chinese science fiction to mainstream international attention.