China Miéville

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 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 left politics in the UK 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.

China Miéville studied at London School of Economics and Political Science, Clare College and Oakham School. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are science fiction, fantasy, steampunk and mysticism. Ballard, Zane Grey and Bruno Schulz are recorded as an influence. Employment is recorded with University of Warwick. Works named in the authority record are Perdido Street Station. Distinctions recorded are Arthur C. Clarke Award, August Derleth Award, Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and Hugo Award for Best Novel.

• Name — China Miéville • Birth Name — China Tom Miéville • Born — 6 September 1972 • Birthplace — Norwich, Norfolk, England • Occupation — Short-story writer, novelist, essayist and comic book author • Period — 1998–present • Movement — New Weird • Website — chinamieville.net

Miéville was born in Norwich and brought up in Willesden, and has lived in London since early childhood. Miéville's parents separated soon after his birth, and he has said that he "never really knew" his father. 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 granddaughter of Edward Littleton, 4th Baron Hatherton. His parents chose his first name, China, from a dictionary, looking for a beautiful name. By virtue of his mother's nationality, Miéville holds US citizenship in addition to British citizenship. In 1982 his mother married Paul Lightfoot, a maternal descendant of George Charles Mostyn, 6th Baron Vaux of Harrowden; they divorced in 1992. Miéville boarded at 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 PhD 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 history and political events, he became a Marxist at university. A book version of his PhD 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.

Miéville has previously been a member of the International Socialist Organization (US) and, until 13 March 2013, was also a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP, UK). He stood unsuccessfully for the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in the 2001 general election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance, gaining 459 votes, equivalent to 1.2%, in Regent's Park and Kensington North, a Labour constituency. In January 2013, he emerged as a critic of the SWP's leadership and in March resigned over the leadership's handling of rape allegations against a leading SWP member. In August 2013, Miéville was one of nine signatories (along with veteran film-maker and socialist Ken Loach, academic Gilbert Achcar, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Kate Hudson, fellow novelist Michael Rosen, and actor Roger Lloyd Pack) of an open letter to The Guardian announcing the foundation of a "new party of the left", to be called Left Unity. The letter, which claimed that Labour policies on austerity and the breaking of ties with trades unions amounted to a "final betrayal of the working-class people it was founded to represent", stated that Left Unity would be launched at a "founding conference" in London on 30 November 2013 and would provide, as an "alternative" to Labour, "a party that is socialist, environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination". In 2014, together with Richard Seymour and others, Miéville quit the International Socialist Network, a Left Unity faction, over a dispute concerning the acceptability of sexual "race play" that was prompted by discussion of a controversial art piece owned by Dasha Zhukova. In 2015, he was announced as one of the founding editors of a "bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters", Salvage. He has been the director of Salvage Publications since 2014. October, published in 2017, documents the dramatic events of the Russian revolution. Jonathan Steele reviewed it for The Guardian. Steele considers it an ideological though nuanced retelling: "Known as a left-wing activist, [...] Miéville writes with the brio and excitement of an enthusiast who would have wanted the revolution to succeed. But he is primarily interested in the dramatic narrative – the weird facts – of the most turbulent year in Russia's history". In a letter to Joybrato Mukherjee on 22 April 2024, Miéville rejected his nomination for a DAAD fellowship, citing Mukherjee's role in the cancelling of Jewish-American political theorist Nancy Fraser's Albertus Magnus Professorship at the University of Cologne because Fraser signed a pro-Palestine letter during the Gaza war, and his lack of "faith that the institution will stand against such a shameful program of repression and anti-Palestinian racism."

In the early 2000s, Miéville lived in London with his partner Emma Bircham. They were both cast as extras in the 1999 film Notting Hill, which he jokingly described as a dystopian alternate history of an ethnically cleansed city. In 2013, Miéville denied allegations of emotional abuse made by an ex-girlfriend. He acknowledged having had a brief affair with the woman, but stated that her account of it was untrue. According to Miéville, he was in a non-monogamous relationship at the time, about which she was aware. Since 2018, he has taken steps to defend his privacy, following what he described as a campaign of harassment and online defamation. Miéville is married to artist Season Butler.

• Perdido Street Station (2000) • The Scar (2002) • Iron Council (2004)

• King Rat (1998) • Un Lun Dun (2007) • The City & the City (2009) • Kraken (2010) • Embassytown (2011) • Railsea (2012) • The Book of Elsewhere (2024), with Keanu Reeves • The Rouse (2026)

• The Tain (2002) • This Census-Taker (2016) • The Last Days of New Paris (2016)

• Pathfinder Chronicles: Guide to the River Kingdoms (2010), with Elaine Cunningham, Chris Pramas, and Steve Kenson. Paizo Publishing.

• "Watching God" (first publ. in Three Moments of an Explosion, 2015), in Out of the Ruins, edited by Preston Grassmann, Titan Books, 2021

• "London's Overthrow" (2011). Reprinted in a shorter version as "Oh, London, You Drama Queen", The New York Times Magazine 2012-03-01: 42. • "Preface to a Book not yet Written nor Disavowed" (2015). China Miéville: Critical Essays, eds. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia.

• In 2006 Miéville's short story "Details" (collected in Looking for Jake) was adapted as a screenplay by Dan Kay, and subsequently picked up by the studio Paramount Vantage. • In February 2013, a stage adaptation of The City and the City, written by Christopher M. Walsh and directed by Dorothy Milne, made its world premiere at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Miéville attended 16 March 2013 production of the adaptation. • A television adaptation of the novel The City & the City was broadcast on BBC 2 in 2018. • American artist Mariam Ghani's The City & The City (2015) is a loose adaptation of the novel The City & the City as a video artwork which "maps the conceptual framework of that novel onto the cityscape of St. Louis, melding some of the fictions of the novel's world with elements drawn from past and present histories of the city." • The short story "Estate" (collected in Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories) was adapted into a 25-minute movie, released on August 14, 2020, that was described by a review in SciFiNow as "a 25 minute blast of striking imagery, earnest performances and intriguing themes."

* * * * * * • Reviews Railsea.

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A comprehensive list of Miéville's work is available at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

• The Worst Breakfast (2016), co-written and illustrated by Zak Smith

• Hellblazer (1988 series) – #250 "Holiday Special": "Snow Had Fallen" (Feb. 2009) • Justice League (2011 series) – #23.3 "Dial E #1: Dial Q for Qued" (Nov. 2013) • Dial H (2012–2013 series) – #1-#15

• Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2005). Leiden: Brill. • Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (2009), with Mark Bould. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. • October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (2017). Verso. • A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (2022). Head of Zeus.

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