Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang (Port Jefferson, New York, 1967) is one of the world’s most eminent science fiction writers. The son of Taiwanese exiles, his Chinese name is Feng-nan. With a degree in Computer Science from Brown University, he presently lives in Seattle near the Microsoft headquarters since he combines literature with his work as a technical writer in the software industry. He began to write short stories in high school and later studied at the prestigious Clarion Writers Workshop, a seminar for science fiction writers. Although he has never published a novel, and only two collections of short stories in the thirty years of his writing career, he has been awarded the most important prizes in the genre, including the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. In 2002 he published his first collection of short stories Story of Your Life and Others (in Spanish, La historia de tu vida, Alamut, 2015) which, in time, has become a cult book. It includes “Story of Your Life”, which was made into the film Arrival by Denis Villeneuve in 2016. Chiang understands science fiction as a genre that explores the limits of human knowledge and, through his highly detailed and well documented writing, he probes the key philosophical predicaments of the contemporary world. His second and most recent short story collection, Exhalation: Stories (in Catalan, Exhalació, Mai Més / Sexto Piso, 2020), in which he once again reconsiders humanity’s relationship with technology, was selected by The New York Times as one of the five best works of fiction in 2019.