R. F. Kuang on Claiming Her Voice

The New York Times Bestselling author admittedly once shied away from calling herself a woman author. R. F. Kuang had plenty of role models to look up to when she set her sights on becoming a writer and sought, instead, to escape the constraints her gender imposed on her craft. 

Her characters, like The Poppy War’s Rin, exercised their autonomy to make decisions about their bodies, their futures and their voices that sought to position them outside of the constraints of patriarchy, allowing them to circumscribe the ‘strong woman’ character archetypes, and allowing Kuang to establish herself as a leading writer in the field, and not just within her gender.

As the constraints of gender tighten around women and girls across the country, with 22 million girls and women living in states where abortion is restricted or inaccessible just 2 years after the Dobbs ruling, Kuang is rethinking her position and the importance of her voice, freedom and expression as a woman to champion the voices that will go unheard as they confront the new realities of womanhood. 

At the 2024 Girls Write Now awards, she left us with this charge to celebrate the voices historically disempowered because of their gender.. 

“We’re in this room because our voices were and are heard. We must continue to write worlds where all women can narrate their futures.”

Now she shares her Life@GWN with us.

Who was your mentor growing up? 

My highschool debate coach. I actually had a speech impediment growing up, and he was the person who helped me find my voice and be able to speak in public and feel like my voice mattered and that people cared about what I had to say. 

What was your favorite book? 

This is an impossible question for writers, but my favorite book right now is a book on craft that I found very helpful to me. It’s called Several Short Sentences about Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg and it’s readjusting everything I thought I knew about creativity and flow and spontaneity and the dreaded revisions. It’s the equivalent of eating your vegetables for craft books and I keep coming back to it. I find it very helpful. 

Why are you supporting Girls Write Now? 

I think the voices of girls and women matter now more than ever as we are watching an unprecedented attack on the reproductive rights of women and our ability to make our own choices about our bodies. It seems like we’ve made all these gains for feminism over the past few decades, but the current term of the Supreme Court has taught us how tenuous those gains are. I’m here because I think we need to make sure our voices are protected and heard.