The Arthur C. Clarke Award winner has been announced: The City & The City by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK), an unprecedented third-time win of the prestigious UK award. Miéville will receive an engraved bookend and a check for £2,010. The Clarke shortlist included works by Gwyneth Jones, Adam Roberts, Kim Stanley Robinson, Marcel Theroux, and Chris Wooding.

Miéville said he was “absolutely gobsmacked” and “incredibly honored” to win the award, set up by Clarke to help promote science fiction in the UK. “It’s very different from most of my other books,” said Miéville, whose titles Perdido Street Station and Iron Council previously won the award. “It was very much written in an effort to be absolutely faithful to works of crime fiction.  Crime readers will denounce a book because it has ‘cheated,’ and I wanted to write a book that didn’t cheat, that was faithful to crime rules and that if you’d never read any fantasy you could pick up.”