The cult author who refuses to play by the book world's rules

The Age

2 days ago

For Rebecca F. Kuang, the easiest way to resist the internet is to carry a phone that won't cooperate. It doesn't glow, buzz, or beg for her attention – and she prefers it that way. It's a statement of defiance against the glowing promise that apps would make us more connected and productive. Instead, Kuang says, they've shredded attention spans and left us more alone than ever.
'My phone's basically a brick. It can't access most apps,' she says. 'People can't send me TikTok links. I can never see them. Of course, a lot of stuff is going to get caught in the net, but on the whole, it's great because I spend so much more time reading and writing and cooking and being grounded in the world around me and very little time online.'
No X, no TikTok, no doom spiral of headlines – a notable abstinence, given the starring role the internet played in her bestselling 2023 novel Yellowface, a razor-edged literary satire about a struggling white writer who swipes the manuscript and identity of her dead Chinese friend, only to face the wrath of the online mob.
'That was my internet novel. It was really me getting the internet out of my system. I'm actually pretty extreme about digital minimalism,' Kuang, who publishes as R.F. Kuang, says.
'I knew I was never going to write a book like Yellowface again because that just was not a sustainable way for me to be in the world, so I felt like this freedom to do whatever I wanted with the next book. It will probably appeal to a different set of readers, and that's exciting to me, like I'm tired of talking about Yellowface.'
Kuang is in her husband Bennett Eckert-Kuang's study in their Boston home when we speak over video – not her natural habitat. Enclosed spaces, she explains, feel stifling; she prefers to work somewhere open, where the air can move and the light can spill in. But today, the fading light cuts across her face, artfully preparing us for the shadows of her new novel.
If you haven't read Yellowface, you've almost certainly seen it – the bold, winking yellow cover staring back at you from bookshop tables and BookTok. Inside, Kuang skewers the publishing industry and the chronically online mindset with a scalpel and a smirk: taking on how technology has rewired the way we consume art, perform outrage, and weaponise accountability. It's been optioned for a scripted television series with Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Yellowjackets, Girlfight) attached to direct.
While Yellowface was strikingly topical and opened the door to a wider readership, Kuang had already been forging her path through the searing landscapes of historical fantasy with The Poppy War trilogy (2018–2020) and Babel (2022). Drawing on mid-20th-century Chinese history and begun when she was just 19, The Poppy War was no overnight success – Kuang admits she initially felt 'sick to my stomach' every time she thought about sales – but word of mouth gradually built momentum. Meanwhile, Babel, set in 1830s England, became a BookTok hit. This steady rise meant, Kuang says, the sudden attention from Yellowface never 'messed me up'.
As she critiqued publishing's pigeonholing of authors in Yellowface, Kuang herself refuses to be confined by genre or expectation. Almost as soon as she penned the novel, Kuang admits she was bored with the frenetic, internet-fuelled tone that is omnipresent in today's literary landscape – eager instead to explore new territories, both thematically and stylistically, in her work.
'I feel like I'm still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me,' she says.
'I think there is this sort of resistant delight to defying categorisation because when you are pretty overtly racialised or gendered, as so many people are, you do always want to be acting out against expectation.
'That resentment of expectation is not what drives me. It's just something I find psychologically interesting about myself. What drives me is wanting to evolve as an artist with every project.'
I think it never got to my head or messed me up because I'm really good at moving on to the next project.
She's also grown wary of publishing's other obsession – youth. In a recent piece for Time headlined Olivia Rodrigo and the Impossible Pressure to Stay a Prodigy, Kuang, 29, reflects on the pressure of being 'young' in the literary world. The scepticism that has met her, the interest in her age rather than work, and the anxiety that the apex of her career might have come and gone.
'It's really stupid, I think, that we are so obsessed with young authors in literature. Literature is one of the one things that you only get better at as you get older,' Kuang says. 'I hope I'm not in my prime. I hope that my prime is decades away.'
Kuang might not realise it yet, given her self-imposed social media ban, but her readers are already gearing up for her sixth novel out this month. Roll your eyes at BookTokers if you like, but they're busily assembling reading lists heavy with Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante as they prepare for the release of Katabasis – a richly layered, genre-bending dive into the underworld. (The title comes from the Greek word meaning 'descent').
In Katabasis, Cambridge doctoral student Alice Law and her nemesis Peter Murdoch wield pentagram magic to descend into the Eight Courts of Hell, all in a desperate bid to rescue their professor's soul – without him, their crucial recommendation letter is lost. The novel deftly plays with the classical stages of the underworld journey – the descent, the ordeal, and the return (anabasis) – while tipping its hat to Alice in Wonderland, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and even drawing from the surreal dreamscapes of Dali.
If you're counting subgenres, it's a clever mashup of dark academia and historical fantasy, with an enemies-to-lovers twist. And while this might seem underworlds apart from Yellowface, Kuang is as critical as ever, cutting through the pretension, privilege, and politics of academia. If Babel's Oxford setting allowed an examination of the institution's historical role as a facilitator of imperial projects, Katabasis focuses on the interpersonal – the inflated egos, the skewed priorities and values, and the fraught, often toxic, relationships between students and teachers.
'I think of them as a duology that deals with why I love the academy so much and can't step away but why I am increasingly uncomfortable with it,' Kuang says, perfectly placed to say so, having roamed some of the world's most elite academic halls. From her undergraduate years at Georgetown University to graduate degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, she's now teaching and finishing a PhD in sinology at Yale. Her research spans Chinese-language literature and Asian American writing, focusing on Chinese American and Chinese diaspora authors and their explorations of travel, language, geography, and storytelling. Kuang – who was born in Guangzhou, China, moved with her parents to Dallas, Texas, when she was four – grew up in a household that valued literature highly and was always drawn to fantasy.
She started her PhD the same year as her husband, who's pursuing philosophy at MIT, started his. They recently celebrated their first anniversary. While some couples spend their evenings arguing over whether a potato is too far gone to cook for dinner, theirs seems to involve lively debates on logic paradoxes and the quirks of rational decision-making, conversations about which inspired Katabasis.
'I just fell in love with the idea of logic paradoxes, especially paradoxes of rational decision-making, which feels very pertinent to how we live our lives,' Kuang says.
'There are so many paradoxes where you make a series of decisions that seem like you're better off at every stage, and then suddenly you find yourself in a far worse position than you anticipated, with no way to claw out of it. And that seemed like a lovely way to describe being in a PhD program.'
Kuang's academic and creative worlds have never been separate – they flow into one another. Her novels are set on campuses or in educational institutions, and weave in her scholarly pursuits. Her advisors often remind her to rein in her signature point of view, reminding her she's writing an essay, not fiction.
'I find it very difficult to keep the creative voice from seeping into my academic work. I'm always having conversations with my advisor about how my academic writing needs to be a little less opinionated and have a little less of that spunk and flair that I like to bring to my fiction prose.'
Having reached new heights after Yellowface, Kuang could now write full-time. When asked why she hasn't stepped away from academia, the answer is simple: 'I like it.'
I feel like I'm still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me.
'I wish I had a more sophisticated answer than that, but I think I'm in a lucky position where I have multiple career options. I could be a full-time author, I could be a full-time academic, and I just enjoy both too much to give either of them up. I always tell myself, the moment it stops being engaging, I'll step away,' Kuang says.
'For all that is frustrating and broken about academia, I'm still committed to this core promise of inquiry and curiosity and sharing it with others, and I do still regularly feel that when I step into a classroom.'
She didn't feel the weight of expectation after Yellowface – no sudden compulsion to chase its sharp success or bottle its biting style. Instead, she slipped quietly into her next chapter, boarding a flight to Taipei to plunge straight into research for a new book.
'I think it never got to my head or messed me up because I'm really good at moving on to the next project,' she says.
'I never enjoy doing the same thing twice. I get bored really easily and I don't like feeling like I'm repeating myself. I just like jumping down new rabbit holes and seeing who's going to follow me there.'
Loading
Her next novel, Taipei Story, is a coming-of-age story about language, family, and grief. She says it takes inspiration from novelists Elif Batuman, Sally Rooney and Patricia Lockwood, and follows a student spending a summer in Taipei studying Chinese while wrestling with questions of identity and belonging. It's a clear break from fantasy, and she's relishing the stylistic stretch.
Writing, however, has only grown trickier. Taipei Story has been through several drafts – each one a meticulous autopsy of every word, comma, and cadence. Kuang is merciless with herself as she works through them. 'I hate every single word I put down,' she says. But this isn't a crisis of confidence. Kuang says her reading has sharpened, her standards have risen, and now her prose has to keep pace.
'When my writing feels hardest, the results are often the most rewarding,' she says. 'It's not that I've gotten worse as a writer, it's that I've gotten better as a reader, and now I need my writing to catch up.'
If her personal katabasis means crawling through literary darkness searching for the good stuff, then the rest of us might as well switch our phones to silent and go with her. In myth, the hero returns.