Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History. Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. It asks the question, can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?
Her novel, Yellowface, is about young writer Juniper Song who becomes an overnight sensation – but she is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American. Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. It’s a timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.
Rebecca’s newest book, Katabasis (August 2025), is a new dark academia fantasy in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.
A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Chinese literature, and Asian American literature.
