REBECCA F. kuANG
Chinese-American Fantasy Writer
Marshall Scholar, Class of 2018 (Cambridge University)
“Fiction is this incredible tool of radical empathy where you imagine yourself in that situation and you do the attendant research and figure out based on sources what was going on, but have the freedom to fill in the blanks and project yourself backwards in time… the wonderful thing about speculative fiction is you can take some aspect of society, some facet, something about power dynamics, and refract it... Nothing else allows us to distort large issues to look at them better.”
- Rebecca f. kuang
filling the silences of history
Rebecca F. Kuang is an award-winning Chinese American fantasy writer. She published her first novel, The Poppy War, a military fantasy based on the Second Sino-Japanese War at the age of 22. She was awarded both the Crawford Award and Compton Crook Award for First Best Novel in 2018, and nominated for the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award.
Her inspiration for the novel, which is the first of a trilogy, stemmed from her inability to find books about Chinese history as a young reader. She hoped that through her use of fantasy she is able to fill the silence around specific historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre as well as give other Chinese Americans the opportunity to read about their history.