Publication Order of The Poppy War Books
| The Poppy War | 2018 |
| The Dragon Republic | 2019 |
| The Burning God | 2020 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Babel, or the Necessity of Violence | 2022 |
| Yellowface | 2023 |
| Katabasis | 2025 |
| Taipei Story | 2026 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| The Drowning Faith | 2020 |
| Making Space | 2025 |
About R. F. Kuang
R. F. Kuang (Rebecca F. Kuang, born 29 May 1996 in Guangzhou, China) is an American novelist known for the Poppy War fantasy trilogy, “Babel” and “Yellowface”. “Babel” reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and won the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Kuang moved to the United States with her family at the age of four and grew up in Dallas, Texas, graduating from the Greenhill School in 2013. She studied history at Georgetown University and began writing “The Poppy War” during a gap year in China, where she worked as a debate coach. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016. A Marshall Scholarship took her to England for an MPhil in Chinese studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and an MSc in contemporary Chinese studies at University College, Oxford. She returned to the United States in 2020 to begin a PhD in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale.
“The Poppy War” was published by Harper Voyager in 2018, shortly before her 22nd birthday. It is a military fantasy that draws its plot and politics from mid-20th-century China, with a central conflict based on the Second Sino-Japanese War. “The Dragon Republic” (2019) and “The Burning God” (2020) complete the trilogy. The series earned her the Compton Crook Award, the Crawford Award and the 2020 Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and it was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2021.
“Babel, or the Necessity of Violence” (2022) is an alternative history set in a fantastical version of Oxford in the 1830s. As well as the Nebula it won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and a British Book Award for fiction. “Yellowface” (2023), her first novel outside fantasy, is a satire of publishing in which a white author steals the unpublished manuscript of a more successful Asian American novelist who has died in an accident. It won the Goodreads Choice Award for fiction.
“Katabasis” (2025) follows two Cambridge PhD students of magic who travel to Hell to bring back the soul of their adviser. Amazon MGM Studios bought the screen rights for a television series shortly before publication. “Taipei Story”, published on 8 September 2026, is a coming-of-age novel about a college freshman on a language study programme in Taipei. In June 2026 Kuang was appointed the first Millard Distinguished Writer in Residence at the College of the Holy Cross.
Photo: Jennifer 8. Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).