China Miéville is a Londoner and a writer of big, crowded novels about cities and their lives and the lives of their denizens. He was born in 1972, named China after the rhyming slang (China plate/mate), and raised by his mother Claudia Lightfoot. After an unhappy experience at boarding school, he was educated at Cambridge and Harvard, earning a first degree in Social Anthropology and an MA and Ph D in marxist economics. His intellectual formation is broadly left-wing; after a brief and, for him, unsatisfying engagement with postmodern approaches, he turned to Marxism. He finds that Marxism, particularly in its emphasis on the dialectic, provides him with a global and dynamic view of history and society, into which his strongly-…
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