It’s RF Kuang’s World, We’re Just Living In It

September 08, 2025 • Read in 4 minutes

Dear Hyphenly Readers,

RF Kuang began to write in her second year of college. She had only written fanfiction before, but now she dabbled in fantasy and showed her father drafts of what she was writing. While teaching debate in China, she shaped those early drafts into what became her debut novel. Three years later, after graduating, she published The Poppy War.

A dark fantasy that grew into one of the most acclaimed trilogies of recent years, The Poppy War made Kuang an instant literary sensation. Drawing on mid-20th-century Chinese politics, the novel follows a war orphan caught up in opium smuggling, blending Kuang’s family history with reimaginings of the Nanjing Massacre and the Battle of Shanghai.

“I chose to write a fantasy reinterpretation of China's twentieth century, because that was the kind of story I wasn't finding on bookshelves.”

R. F. Kuang

After completing the trilogy, Kuang turned to the world of academia for her next book. In 2022, she published Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. Set in 1830s Oxford, where she was finishing her master’s degree, the novel quickly became a New York Times bestseller.

In 2023, just before beginning her PhD at Yale, she released Yellowface, perhaps her most famous book to date and a viral phenomenon on BookTok. Unlike her earlier fantasy works, Yellowface satirizes the publishing industry itself, following a white author who passes off her late Chinese colleague’s manuscript as her own.

“I think I completely reinvent myself every few years,” she told Hua Hsu, who recently profiled her for The New Yorker. 

Her latest, Katabasis, appeared this August. A dark academia novel, it follows two graduate students who descend into hell to secure a letter of recommendation from their deceased advisor.

Kuang was born in Guangzhou and immigrated to the United States with her family in 2000, when she was four. As Hsu notes, “Like many immigrants, Kuang had maintained a largely conceptual relationship to her native country as a child… Her parents wanted their children to appreciate their heritage, but they didn’t talk much about the family’s experiences during the nation’s twentieth-century tumult.” For Kuang, writing about China’s past became a way of understanding her family’s story. She often describes her father as her greatest champion, proud of how she has transformed history into fiction.

Even as readers are devouring Katabasis, Kuang is already at work on her next project, titled Taipei Story.

Have you read Kuang’s work? Tell us which one gripped you the most… or send us your hot takes!

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