#About the event
Duration: 60 minutes
7:45pm, Tuesday 12th May 2026
Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse
119 Lamington St, New Farm
Anyone who’s spent time in academia will relish fantasy queen RF Kuang’s latest novel, a gleefully dark and inventive journey into the literal hellscape of the modern university. In Katabasis, two postgraduate students must overcome their bitter rivalry and venture into the underworld to save the soul of their late thesis supervisor, and thus save their own fledgling careers – but at what cost? Hear one of genre fiction’s most captivating and imaginative writers discuss this wildly entertaining and whipsmart tale with Rhianna Patrick.
#Artists
Rebecca Kuang
Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator, and the Astounding Award-winning and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. 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.
Rhianna Patrick
Rhianna Patrick is a Torres Strait Islander journalist, broadcaster and writer.
