R. F. Kuang

She emigrated to the United States from Guangzhou, China, with her family when she was four years old.[10][11] Kuang's father grew up in Leiyang, in Hunan province; her mother grew up on Hainan Island.[12] Her mother's father fought for Chiang Kai-shek.[12] Her father's family experienced the Japanese conquest of Hunan.[12][13]

Kuang grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Greenhill School in 2013.[14] She went on to Georgetown University, attracted by the college's well-known debating team.[10] Halfway through college, Kuang was 19 when she began writing Poppy War during a gap year in China, where she worked as a debate coach; the book was published when she was 22.[10][15] Kuang graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016 and attended the CSSF Novel Writing Workshop in 2017.[11] She graduated from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in June 2018. She spent the summer after graduation coaching a debate camp in Colorado.[12][10][15]

She attended Magdalene College, University of Cambridge as a recipient of a 2018 Marshall Scholarship, where she gained a Master of Philosophy in Chinese Studies.[2][15][16] She is currently pursuing a MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies at Oxford University.[16]

Her debut novel The Poppy War, a Chinese military fantasy, was published by Harper Voyager in 2018 and is the first book in a planned trilogy.[17] The Poppy War has received mainly favorable reviews, with Publishers Weekly calling it "a strong and dramatic launch to Kuang’s career".[18]

The Poppy War, a grimdark fantasy, draws its plot and politics from mid-20th-century China,[19][20][21] with the conflict in the novel based on the Second Sino-Japanese War, and an atmosphere inspired by the Song dynasty.[22] The Poppy War was nominated for the 2019 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.[23]

Kuang's novel The Poppy War was finalist for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. The novel won the 2019 Compton Crook Award for best first English language novel of the year[4] and the 2019 Crawford Award, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.[5]

Kuang was also a finalist for the 2019 Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

• Official website
• R. F. Kuang on Twitter
• R. F. Kuang at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database