Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he wrote the Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series in which the heroes are engineers, not wizards, as well as short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also penned the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

He’s often involved in media adaptations of his work. Recent projects include “The Message,” under development by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment and AMC’s Pantheon, adapted from an interconnected series of Liu’s short stories.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently lectures on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

For his Fellowship, Liu plans to organize and lead an interdisciplinary storymaking / storybreaking/storytelling effort in the Vaster Than Empires project, which brings together scientists, storytellers, and media specialists to advance our collective capacity to understand as well as to imagine forms of intelligence that transcend the individual human mind to encompass planetary perspectives.