Chiang was born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York. Both of his parents were born in China and emigrated to Taiwan with their families during the Chinese Communist Revolution before emigrating to the United States. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (姜峯楠). He graduated from Brown University with a computer science degree. He had been submitting stories to magazines since high school and after attending the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1989 he sold his first story, “The Tower of Babylon”, to the Omni science magazine.

Chiang has published seventeen short stories, novelettes, and novellas as of 2019, and has won numerous science fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for “Tower of Babylon” (1990); the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992; a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for “Story of Your Life” (1998); a Sidewise Award for “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000); a Nebula Award, Locus Award, and Hugo Award for his novelette “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2002); a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007); a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Exhalation” (2009); and a Hugo Award and Locus Award for his novella “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” (2010).

Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary” in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted.

Chiang was an instructor at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at UC San Diego in 2012 and 2016.

In 2013, his collection of translated stories Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes won the German Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis for best foreign science fiction.