Acclaimed fantasy author Rebecca F. Kuang will deliver this year’s Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. The lecture will take place on Monday, May 23rd in the Pichette Auditorium at 6 PM BST.

Kuang is best known for the Poppy War trilogy, a grimdark fantasy based on Chinese history. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. In 2020, she also won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

In addition to being a fantasy writer, Kuang is a Marshall Scholar and a Chinese-English translator. 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.

Kuang currently has two more novels in the works: Babel, a historical fantasy inspired by her time at Oxford, set to release this year, and Yellowface, to be released in 2023. For more on Kuang’s work, visit her website at rfkuang.com.

Click here to reserve a ticket for the lecture.

The lecture will also be made available via the Tolkien Lecture YouTube channel.