Since making her debut in 2018 with the much-acclaimed fantasy The Poppy War, RF Kuang has continued to delight critics and amass awards along with a devoted readership.
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Born in Guangzhou in 1996, Rebecca Kuang was four when her family moved to Texas and by her teenage years was immersing herself in the speculative fiction of authors such as China Miéville. Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card was also an influence, with the structure of his Ender’s Game helping shape the first instalment in Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy, which she began during a gap year in China when she was 19 years old. The book was published just as she was taking up a prestigious Marshall Scholarship, which allowed her to complete an MPhil in Chinese Studies at Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies at Oxford, all while penning its sequels – The Dragon Republic and The Burning God.
The trilogy established Kuang as a novelist adept at blending history and fantasy to build a dramatic narrative, but devoting herself to fiction held less appeal than the world of academia. Delaying her studies because of the Covid pandemic meant she was writing full time but she found, at the time at least, that ‘It’s a lot of talking to yourself… and any ideas that I generate on my own just bounce back and forth in this echo chamber of naïve silliness.’ By contrast, continuing her studies offered the opportunity to interact with ‘smarter people’ who would challenge her thinking and she returned to America late in 2020 to embark on a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
At the outset of her PhD Kuang declared that she would be slowing down her fiction writing, but research questions and her time at Oxbridge gave rise to numerous story ideas and she has since published three standalone novels: Babel in 2022, Yellowface the following year, and 2025’s Katabasis. Each one a work of dark academia, collectively they bring to the fore Kuang’s scholarly prowess, on-going critique of racial prejudice, and lifetime of reading science fiction and fantasy, with more to come. Her seventh novel, Taipei Story, is set for release in September 2026 and Kuang has signed a deal for a further three novels with HarperCollins.
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