American · b. 1996
Rebecca F. Kuang is an American novelist born in Guangzhou, China, who moved to the United States as a child. She studied at Georgetown University and later earned graduate degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, and she completed a PhD in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale. She first drew attention with The Poppy War, a military fantasy trilogy inspired by twentieth-century Chinese history. Babel, a dark academia fantasy about translation and empire, won the Nebula Award and became a bestseller. Yellowface, a satire of the publishing industry, reached a wide audience and was a major commercial success. Katabasis followed in 2025. Her work deals with colonialism, language, race and ambition. She is one of the most widely read young fantasy and literary authors writing in English today.