China Miéville

China Tom Miéville FRSL (/miˈeɪvəl/ mee-AY-vəl; 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.

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 Award. 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.

Miéville is active in anti-capitalist politics in the United Kingdom and has previously been a member of the International Socialist Organization (US) and the short-lived International Socialist Network (UK). He was formerly a member of the Socialist Workers Party and, in 2013, became a founding member of Left Unity. He stood for Regent's Park and Kensington North for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 United Kingdom general election, gaining 1.2% of votes cast. He published his Ph.D. thesis on Marxism and international law as a book in 2005.

Miéville was born in Norwich and brought up in Willesden, and has lived in London since early childhood. He grew up with his sister Jemima and mother Claudia. His mother was a translator, writer, and teacher and the daughter of Leo Claude Vaux Miéville, whose wife Youla (née Harrison) was the granddaughter of the 4th Baron Hatherton. His parents chose his first name, China, from a dictionary, looking for a beautiful name. By virtue of his mother's birth in New York City, Miéville holds dual American and British citizenship. In 1982 his mother married Paul Lightfoot, who also has aristocratic connections; they divorced in 1992.

Miéville attended Oakham School, a co-educational independent school in Oakham, Rutland, for two years. He subsequently attended University College School. At the age of eighteen, in 1990, he taught English for a year in Egypt, where he developed an interest in Arab culture and in Middle Eastern politics. Miéville studied for a BA degree in social anthropology at Clare College, Cambridge, graduating in 1994, and gained both a master's degree and Ph.D. in international law from the London School of Economics in 2001. 

Miéville has also held a Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard University. After becoming dissatisfied with the ability of post-modern theories to explain the history and political events, he became a Marxist at university. A book version of his Ph.D. thesis, entitled Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, was published in the UK in 2005 by Brill in their "Historical Materialism" series and in the United States in 2006 by Haymarket Books.