Rebecca F Kuang, 27, is an American writer. She and her family emigrated to the US from Guangzhou, China, when she was four; she grew up in Dallas, Texas. Her first novel, The Poppy War, a grimdark fantasy with a plot drawn from elements of the second Sino-Japanese war, was published in 2018. Two sequels followed. A fourth novel, the bestselling Babel, set in 1830s England, came out in 2022. Kuang followed this with a controversial departure: Yellowface. A contemporary melodrama in which a white author steals the manuscript of a dead, far more successful Asian-American novelist and passes it off as her own, it wickedly satirises identity politics in the world of publishing. It comes out in paperback this month. Kuang has postgraduate degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and is currently a doctorate student at Yale.
Is it true that your agent cautioned against publishing Yellowface when you first told her about the idea?
Yes, that’s true. She was a bit stunned, caught off guard. “I’m really worried it’s going to offend people,” she said. But I was convinced both by its strength as a story, and by what I was trying to say, so I asked her to get second reads from other people at her agency – and to her credit, she did. She really stuck her neck out.
