When I ask R. F. Kuang how her work as an academic has influenced her work as novelist, she says, "Mostly it means that I don't have enough time to sleep!"
The author of five novels, including a bestselling trilogy that started in 2018 with "The Poppy War," Kuang is a PhD student at Yale University, studying East Asian Languages and Literatures. Her fourth novel, "Babel: An Arcane History" drew upon her love of language, literature and academic settings. She says, "I think the things that I research and am thinking about in an academic sense always trickle into my fiction, which is why so many of my main characters tend to be students."
