Rebecca F. Kuang is a contemporary novelist most well-known for her fantasy and speculative fiction novels; Yellowface is her first work of literary fiction. Born in Guangzhou, China, Kuang's family immigrated to the United States when she was four years old and settled in Texas. She attended Georgetown University and went on to receive a master's degree in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and another master's in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale.
Kuang worked on her first novel, The Poppy War, while on a gap year in college. The novel debuted in 2018 and was followed by two sequel novels, forming the Poppy War Trilogy. In 2022, Kuang released her fourth novel, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, which made it onto The New York Times Bestseller list. Kuang's speculative fiction has garnered several awards given to literature within the fantasy and science fiction genres, such as the Nebula Award and the Crawford Award.
Her fifth novel, Yellowface, came out in 2023. The novel made it onto both the Los Angeles Times bestseller list and The New York Times best-seller list. While completing her Ph.D., Kuang has stated that she is continuing to write and is set to release a sixth novel in the near future.
Rebecca F. Kuang's novel Yellowface (2023) follows the story of June Hayward, a young white woman who has faced years of bitter failure while trying to break into publishing as a fiction writer. June's lack of success is contrasted by the...
