Londoner China Miéville is the author of The City & The City, winner of the 2010 Hugo Award for best novel. Since the late 1990s, he's been writing what he calls "weird fiction," a blend of fantasy, science fiction and horror that's won wide acclaim as well as prestigious awards. Miéville is especially known for the novels that take place in Bas-Lag, a fictional world dominated by the city of New Crobuzon. His three Bas-Lag books are Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2001) and Iron Council (2004); they solidified Miéville's reputation as wildly imaginative as well as brainy. In fact, China Miéville comes to sci-fi by way of academia: he has an undergraduate degree in social anthropology from Cambridge (1994), a Masters degree in international relations from the London School of Economics (1995), where he also earned his doctorate, with a thesis on Marxism and international law. A serious Marxist -- of the historical materialism bent, not the Joe Stalin kind -- Miéville's books nonetheless focus on monsters and magic rather than dialectics and political theory. His other novels include King Rat (1998), Un Lun Dun (2007, for younger readers) and Kraken (2010). He published a book of short stories, Looking for Jake, in 2005.

Extra credit: China Miéville ran for a seat in the British House of Commons in 2001 as a member of the Socialist Alliance... Perdido Street Station, Iron Council and The City & The City all won Arthur C. Clarke Awards... Perdido Street Station and The Scar brought China Miéville back-to-back British Fantasy Awards... His last name is pronounced "mee-AY-vill."