Rebecca Kuang

"Great danger is always associated with great power. The difference between the great and the mediocre is that the great are willing to take the risk."

Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Poppy War trilogy, which fuses fantasy elements with gruesome realities of China’s history. Kuang also wrote the bestselling Babel: An Arcane History, which won numerous awards including the Goodreads Choice Award for Fantasy and the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Her release Yellowface is a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and her first venture into the literary fiction genre. In this novel, she explores racism in the publishing industry with a plotline that sees a white novelist steal an unpublished manuscript from an Asian American author.

Meet R.F. Kuang

Rebecca F. Kuang was born in Guangzhou, China, but moved to the United States with her family at a very young age. Here she lived in Texas before attending Georgetown University for a history major.

During her studies, Kuang took a gap year in China and started writing The Poppy War. She was just 19 when she began writing, and only 22 when it was first published.

“I never really thought about age being a barrier,” she said in an interview with Washington City Paper. She knew that Eragon’s author Christopher Paolini began his writing career at just 15 and was published at 19, so there truly was no limit for Kuang.

A Marshall Scholar, she studied for a Masters of Philosophy in Chinese Studies from Cambridge, and a Master of Sciences in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. In 2020, Kuang returned to the US to pursue a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Chinese literature, and Asian American literature.

Kuang is a master of pulling her real life knowledge and experiences and pouring them into her works. Now that she is studying once again, she has said that her next novel will be a fantasy about to magical PhD students.