Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of the The Poppy War Trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, as well as the forthcoming Yellowface. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Chinese literature, and Asian American literature.

‘Yellowface could not be more different from my previous work. Since wrapping up the The Poppy War Trilogy I’ve enjoyed playing around with vastly different genres and writing styles. Babel was my big ponderous Dickensian bildungsroman; Yellowface, on the other hand, is a zippy, ridiculous thriller meant to imitate the roiling schadenfreude of watching a Twitter meltdown. Babel is a slow read; Yellowface is meant to be devoured in a single sitting. I’ve tried to imitate the breathless, gossipy voice of tabloids and viral threads (you know, the ones with flagrant disregard for truth). You’re supposed to feel sick to your stomach, and sick of everyone involved, and unsure of what to believe except that you still can’t look away. If reading it feels a bit like watching a train crash in slow motion, then I’ll have done my job.’

REBECCA F. KUANG