Chinese author Hao Jingfang has taken out the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette with a short novel, Folding Beijing, that took just three days to write.

The award was announced at the World Science Fiction convention, MidAmeriCon II, in Kansas City, Missouri on August 20, 2016.

The best novelette category is for short works between 7,500 and 17, 500 words.

Hao Jingfang is now the second Chinese author to win one of sci-fi's top awards, after Liu Cixin won the best novel for 2015 with The Three-Body Problem.

Folding Beijing only took the 32-year-old three days to pen in 2012.

The novelette depicts a Beijing divided into three spaces determined by the social class of its people.

During an interview, Hao described how she got the idea for the novelette.

"I saw a lot of people bargaining at a temporary market that sold a lot of cheap products. Around that time, a taxi driver told me that his family struggled to send their children to kindergarten. I thought that in this city people can just pass through everyday life without seeing one another. People don't have much interest in knowing other people. For me it was heartbreaking to read about how people in different spaces had different amounts of time when they had access to daylight."

Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest, the second novel in Liu's trilogy after The Three-Body Problem, was not nominated in this year's awards.

Other winners of the 2016 Hugo Awards are The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin for best novel, Binti by Nnedi Okorafor for best novella and Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer for best short story.