R.F. Kuang

Born in Guangzhou in China, Rebecca F. Kuang moved to the United States at the age of four with her parents and grew up in Dallas, Texas. After studying History at Georgetown University, Kuang attended Magdalene College at Cambridge as a recipient of a 2018 Marshall Scholarship, gaining a MPhil degree in Chinese Studies. Subsequently she obtained a MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford University and went on to pursue a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.

Her debut novel The Poppy War, which Kuang started writing during her gap year in China, came out in 2018 when the author was just 22 years old. A sumptuous slice of grimdark fantasy that draws its plot and politics from mid-20th-century China, The Poppy War earned Kuang the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in 2019 and was followed by The Dragon Republic (2019) and The Burning God (2022). Her fourth novel Babel (2022) is set in 1830s England and explores the power of language and the violence of colonialism.