China Mieville

China Tom Miéville FRSL (born 6 September 1972) is a British speculative fiction writer and literary critic. He often describes his work as weird fiction and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers called New Weird.

Extracted from Wikipedia contributors, “China Miéville.” < Wikipedia > (accessed July 13, 2023).

Miéville has won numerous awards for his fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, British Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, Hugo Award, Locus Award and World Fantasy Awards. He holds the record for the most Arthur C Clarke Award wins (three). His novel Perdido Street Station was ranked by Locus as the 6th all-time best fantasy novel published in the 20th century. During 2012–13, he was writer-in-residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2015.[1]

Honours

Miéville has won numerous accolades in speculative fiction; he holds the record for the most Arthur C Clarke Award wins (three).[42] Perdido Street Station was featured in Locus's poll of all-time best 20th century fantasy novels, where it ranked 6th place.[43]

• Miéville's first novel, King Rat (1998), was nominated for both an International Horror Guild and a Bram Stoker award.
• The Scar received a Philip K. Dick Award special citation.
• "Reports of Certain Events in London" (featured in the anthology McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories) was nominated for a 2005 World Fantasy Award and tied for the 2005 Locus Award for Best Novelette.
• The City & the City won the 2009 Kitschies Award.
• Miéville has been a Guest of Honour at multiple science fiction conventions, including Orbital 2008 the British National Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) in London and Readercon 2006.
• He was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.[54]

Family

• Mother: Claudia Miéville. Born in New York City, she was a translator, writer and teacher.
• Father: (unnamed). Died about 1995.
• Grandfather: Leo Claude Vaux Miéville
• Grandmother: Youla (née Harrison) was granddaughter of Edward Littleton, 4th Baron Hatherton.
• Sister: Jemima Miéville
• Former stepfather: Paul Lightfoot

Origins

From Gordon, Joan (November 2003). "Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville". Science Fiction Studies. DePauw University. 30 (Part 3). < link >

Joan Gordon: Would you describe your childhood and education?

China Miéville: There were three of us in my family: my mum, my sister Jemima, and me, a close-knit single-parent family. I met my father maybe four times, but never really knew him, and he died about 8 years ago. We lived in north-west London, in a working-class, ethnically-mixed area called Willesden (where King Rat opens).

My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached “China,” thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that “china” is Cockney rhyming slang for “mate.” People say “my old china,” meaning “my old mate,” because “china plate” rhymes with “mate.”

Notable kin may include:

• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), poet, diarist, prolific correspondent, and advocate of smallpox inoculation, through her daughter Mary who married James Stuart, earl of Bute.

References

1. https://www.chinamieville.net/ China Miéville is a New York Times-bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction. In 2015 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2018 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. His work has won various prizes, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award, and has been shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. He has previously been Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and Writer-in-Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago, IL. He is one of founding editors of the journal Salvage.
2. Gordon, Joan (November 2003). "Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville". Science Fiction Studies. DePauw University. 30 (Part 3). < link >
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mi%C3%A9ville
   1. "Royal Society of Literature » Current RSL Fellows". rsliterature.org. Archived from the original on 6 February 2019. Retrieved 7 April 2019. < link >
      1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Literature#Fellows The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is a learned society founded in 1820, by King George IV, to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". A charity that represents the voice of literature in the UK, the RSL has about 600 Fellows, elected from among the best writers in any genre currently at work.
4. “A life in writing: China Miéville.” The Guardian (13 May 2011).< link >
5. “Best RD for novelist China Miéville.” (6 June 2023) https://groups.google.com/g/soc.genealogy.medieval/c/juOphVkVwbA/m/...