Her debut novel The Poppy War, a Chinese military fantasy, was published by Harper Voyager in 2018 and is the first book in the Poppy War trilogy. Kuang delivered the Tolkien Lecture in person on May 23, 2022. She took part in a virtual seminar that was held in place of the postponed annual seminar. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford in 2020, but it was postponed to the following year due to the world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. Kuang was originally scheduled to deliver the 8th annual J.R.R. Kuang returned to the United States in the fall of 2020 to pursue a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. The following academic year, she studied at Oxford University and received an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies. Kuang attended Magdalene College, University of Cambridge as a recipient of a 2018 Marshall Scholarship, where she gained a Master of Philosophy in Chinese Studies. She spent the summer after graduation coaching a debate camp in Colorado.

She graduated from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in June 2018. Kuang graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016 and attended the CSSF Novel Writing Workshop in 2017. Halfway through college, Kuang was 19 when she began writing Poppy War during a gap year in China, where she worked as a debate coach the book was published when she was 22. She attended Georgetown University, majoring in History, attracted by the college's well-known debating team after winning the Tournament of Champions. Kuang grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Greenhill School in 2013. Her father's family experienced the Japanese conquest of Hunan.

Her maternal grandfather fought for Chiang Kai-shek. Her father grew up in Leiyang, in Hunan province, and her mother grew up on Hainan Island. Kuang immigrated to the United States from Guangzhou, China, with her family when she was four years old. Kuang has won the Compton Crook Award, the Crawford Award, and the 2020 Astounding Award for Best New Writer, along with being a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, The Kitschies, and British Fantasy awards for her first novel. Kuang released a stand-alone novel, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, in 2022. Her first novel, The Poppy War, was released in 2018, followed by the sequels The Dragon Republic in 2019 and The Burning God in 2020. Kuang is a Chinese-American fantasy writer. Astounding Award for Best New Writer (2020).

Babel rf kuang