Wordfest welcomes bestselling fantasy phenom R.F. Kuang with her highly anticipated novel Katabasis, a dark academia tour de force drenched in magic, which author Leigh Bardugo calls “a witty, gory, harrowing ride.” Kuang’s oeuvre (including Babel and Yellowface) has established her as a master of storytelling. This can’t-miss conversation starts at 7PM MT and will be hosted by Paula Turcotte. Your exclusive ticket includes a pre-signed deluxe limited-edition copy of Katabasis with a custom Canadian tour stamp.
We are grateful to HarperCollins Canada for making it possible to connect you with R.F. Kuang.
Paula Turcotte
Conversation
Audience Q&A
75 minutes. No intermission.
HarperCollins Canada
Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface, which has sold over a million copies internationally. In 2023 Kuang was named a Time100 Next Phenom. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, 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 Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.
Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.
Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.
That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….
Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.
With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.
But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.
Paula Turcotte
Conversation
Audience Q&A
75 minutes. No intermission.
HarperCollins Canada
Paula Turcotte is the Youth Programming Associate at Wordfest. She is a writer and poet who holds an MSt in Creative Writing from Oxford. Her debut chapbook of poetry, Permutations, was published in July 2024 by Baseline Press. Her poems have been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award and longlisted in ROOM’s Poetry Contest. Her recent work appears in Canthius, Arc Poetry, and elsewhere.
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