Out of this world: Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin is Asia's first writer to win Hugo award for best novel
Liu Cixin takes out top prize with story of an alien invasion during the Cultural Revolution
A Chinese novelist has gone where no Asian writer has gone before.
Liu Cixin - author of The Three-Body Problem, a science fiction novel depicting an alien civilisation's invasion of earth during the Cultural Revolution - has taken the prize for best novel at the Hugo Awards, a prestigious series of international literary prizes for sci-fi and fantasy.
The announcement on Sunday by the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention in Washington made the 52-year-old power plant engineer the first writer in Asia to win the award.
The Three-Body Problem, the first of Liu's sci-fi trilogy, won 2,649 votes in the final round of balloting - 200 more than the first runner-up, American novelist Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor.
Ken Liu, the American sci-fi writer who translated Liu Cixin's book into English, attended Sunday's awards ceremony and read the author's speech on his behalf.
Winning the Hugo best novel award was like a science fiction story, mainland media cited Liu Cixin as saying. As a fan of Hugo Award-winning novels, Liu had never thought his name would one day also be associated with the prize until he was inspired by a spaceship, he said, referring to the one depicted in his novel.