Ted Chiang

Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York, to Chinese immigrant parents, studied computer science at Brown University, and has worked for decades as a technical writer in Washington State, publishing short fiction only sporadically: fewer than twenty stories across a four-decade career, most of them award-winning.

Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) collected his first decade of stories, each one an idea pursued to its most rigorous conclusion: Babylonians who dig a tower literally into heaven, a drug that grants perfect recall, and, in the title story, a linguist whose work decoding an alien language begins to unstick her own sense of time and grief.

'Story of Your Life' became the basis for the film Arrival; his subsequent collection, Exhalation, extended the same unhurried, idea-first method, and Chiang has become, on a strikingly small body of work, science fiction's most consistently garlanded writer, a repeat winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.