r.f. kuang

Katabasis is your sixth novel. Do you already have ideas for the next ones?I think I have up to my 12th. Beyond that, I have to live some more life. The seventh is called Taipei Story: a coming-of-age novel about a college freshman who is doing a language study abroad programme in Taipei. She is grappling with loss and grief and family histories,... See more

I had just started a PhD programme, and after a few months of everybody going on about how a PhD is hell, it seemed a natural conceit. But as I kept writing, I found myself asking: “What kind of suffering would you have had to have gone through for hell to seem like a better alternative?” At its heart, it’s a novel about depression and suicide and... See more

I also really love just the sheer wash of yellow over the rest of the face. You don’t get any other facial features or distinguishing traits and I think that that’s a good visual metaphor for how race can function when it’s commodified and used as a reductive marketing label. It’s this flattening quality that erases every other part of a person tha... See more

Something a lot of people struggle with is, what is the ethical standard for one to write about something? When are you allowed to mind your own family’s history? Does it ever feel icky? Does it feel like you’re profiting off of your parents and your grandparents’ trauma? And I don’t think anybody really knows the answer. I think everyone should do... See more

“As long as I’m passionately curious about a topic, at least one other person is going to follow me down that rabbit hole,” she rationalises. If it is difficult to tell what she’s going to do next, then that is the point, she says. “It’s only going to get weirder from here.”

She considered exploring her family history through biography but realised that would have involved making people relive their pain. Fantasy, however, gives the mind more space to roam, creating a familiar yet distant universe with its own logic, hierarchies and possibilities. “I’ve met a lot of readers who thought reading the trilogy was kind of a... See more

“We’re storytellers, and the point of storytelling is, among other things, to imagine outside of your lived experience and empathise with people who are not you, and to ideally write truthfully, and with compassion, a whole range of characters,” she continues. “Otherwise all we could ever publish are memoirs and autobiographies and nobody wants tha... See more

Reviewers then debate June’s right to tell the story, echoing familiar conversations on whether authors should write about characters and histories outside their own race or lived experiences. In Yellowface, that initial query spirals into increasingly outlandish backlashes, and everything that was once coherent and proportionate disappears under a... See more

“I get bored really easily,” Kuang says, an array of books on the shelf behind her, next to what looks like a fluffy toy cat. “I’m never going to write a project in the same genre twice, because there are just too many forms of storytelling that I want to experiment with, and not enough years in my life.”