American · b. 1996
R.F. Kuang writes fantasy that bites. Born in Guangzhou, China in 1996, she moved to Texas at four and grew into a polyglot scholar: Georgetown for double majors in Chinese and international relations, then a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge for Chinese studies, followed by an MPhil in Chinese history at Oxford and a Ph.D. at Yale in East Asian languages and literatures. Her debut, The Poppy War (2018), reimagined the Second Sino-Japanese War through grimdark fantasy and announced a fierce new voice. Babel (2022) turned nineteenth-century Oxford into a meditation on empire, translation, and violence. Yellowface (2023) stripped away the fantasy to satirize the publishing industry's racial politics. Each book cuts differently, but all share her refusal to let readers off easy.