Liu Cixin wins 2018 Arthur C Clarke lifetime award

Liu Cixin, author of the Three-Body trilogy, has won the 2018 Arthur C Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society from the Clarke Foundation.

An international bestseller, the trilogy has sold in excess of a million copies in China, and 400,000 copies into the UK and Commonwealth, according to Cixin's publisher Head of Zeus. Further rights sales have been made in more than 20 territories. Cixin has been awarded two Nebula Awards, as well as the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel for the trilogy.

Refering to "new challenges" faced by human society in the 21st century, the director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Sheldon Brown, said Cixin's triology "helps us to see our problems".

Nicolas Cheetham, publisher at Head of Zeus, said "Three-Body was one of the great reading experiences of my life. It is a milestone in the global development of the SF genre — and as this award confirms, a milestone in the history of SF."

The lifetime award is given each year for "imagination in service", differing from the prize awarded each year for individual novels. This year's winner of the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke award was Anne Charnock for Dreams Before the Start of Time (47North). The year before it was scooped by Colson Whitehead for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad (Fleet).