“I used to print my rejections and Blu-Tack them on the glass pane between my office, and my bedroom. My youngest child, Madeleine, had just been born — she is nine now — and she would nap on that big bed while I worked and kept an eye on her,” he said in his acceptance speech.

Siang Lu accepted the $60,000 prize at an event in Sydney on Thursday night. Source: AAP / Jane Dempster

“The rejections kept piling up. Eventually, they grew so numerous that I could no longer see through the glass, into the bedroom where my daughter slept.”

Ghost Cities was inspired by megacities built in China during the nation’s real estate boom, many of which have been left uninhabited and falling into ruin.

The manuscript for Ghost Cities was completed in 2015, but rejected more than 200 times by publishers in Australia and overseas. Source: AAP / Jane Dempster

It weaves together multiple stories — including that of a young man who is fired from his job as a translator at the Chinese consulate in Sydney, when it is discovered he is monolingual and has been relying on Google Translate.