Yale Library Book Talk: R.F. Kuang

Rebecca Kuang (R.F. Kuang) will be in conversation with Robyn Creswell, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, about her new bestselling novel “Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.”

“Babel” — a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of translation as a tool of empire.

Rebecca F. Kuang is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of 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.

Robyn Creswell is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Steering Committee for the Yale Translation Initiative. His current project, “The Ruins: Arabic Poetry in an Age of Extremes”(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming), is an intellectual history of the Arab world after WWII, told through the lives and works of its representative poets.

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