He is one of the most prestigious sci-fi writers today. Author of only nineteen short narratives over three decades, he has been awarded the most important awards of the genre: four Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, six Locus and the British Science Fiction Association Award, among others. He is the author of The Story of Your Life (Alamut, 2015), whose eponymous tale was adapted into film by Denis Villeneuve with the title Arrival in 2016. Exhalation, his second volume of stories, was selected in 2019 by The New York Times as one of five fiction books of the year.