Liz Williams is a British Science Fiction writer. Her first novel, The Ghost Sister, was published in 2001. Both this novel and her next one, Empire of Bones (2002), were nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of the Inspector Chen series. She is the daughter of a stage magician and a Gothic novelist. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. She has had short stories published in Asimov’s, Interzone, The Third Alternative, and Visionary Tongue. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived and worked in Kazakhstan. Her experiences there are reflected in her 2003 novel Nine Layers of Sky. Her novels have been published in the US and the UK, while her third novel, The Poison Master (2003), has been translated into Dutch.