Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American speculative fiction writer. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (姜峯楠).
Chiang's short fiction works have (as of 2013) won 4 Nebula awards, 3 Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 3 Locus awards, and others.[1] Critic John Clute has praised Chiang's "tight-hewn and lucid" style, and says Chiang's stories have "a magnetic effect on the reader."[2]
Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York,[3] and graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He is a graduate of the noted Clarion Writers Workshop (1989).[4]
Although not a prolific author, having published only fourteen short stories, novelettes and novellas as of 2013, Chiang has to date won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990); the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992; a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "Story of Your Life" (1998); a Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000); a Nebula Award, Locus Award and Hugo Award for his novelette "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2002); a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007); a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Exhalation" (2009); a Hugo Award[5] and Locus Award for his novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (2010).
Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted.[6]
In 2013, his collection of translated stories Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes won the German Kurd Lasswitz Preis as best foreign science fiction.
Chiang's first eight stories are collected in Stories of Your Life and Others (1st US hardcover ed: ISBN 0-7653-0418-X; 1st US paperback ed.: ISBN 0-7653-0419-8).[7] His novelette The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate was also published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang