Rebecca F Kuang: ‘I like to write to my friends in the style of Joan Didion’

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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...