Posted in: Amazon Studios, TV | Tagged: Katabasis

Katabasis: RF Kuang's New Fantasy Academia Novel Gets Amazon Series

R.F. Kuang's new fantasy novel Katabasis is already in development for a TV series by Angela Kang at Amazon MGM Studios before publication.

Katabasis, acclaimed fantasy author R.F. Kuang's new novel, has already been picked up for development into a TV series at Amazon MGM Studios with Angela Kang as executive producer. Katabasis, which is Ancient Greek for "a hero's journey into the underworld", is a fantastical academic satire that follows Alice Law, a graduate student studying Magick at Cambridge University, as she descends into the underworld to retrieve her deceased advisor, Professor Grimes, in order to get his recommendation to secure her future after graduation. Alice's academic rival, Peter Murdoch, decides to join her, and together they embark on a journey through the courts of Hell in search of Grimes. The book is out on August 26th, but it was already shopped around in galley form amongst the studios before its official publication date.

Amazon MGM Studios had optioned the TV rights for Katabasis and describes the adaptation as "a dark academia fantasy in which two graduate students in Magick must put aside their rivalry and journey through Hell to save their professor's soul — perhaps at the cost of their own." Anyone who's ever toiled in academia will know what that feels like. Kuang is writing from what she knows since she is a Marshall Scholar with an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford, and is currently pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.

Kuang had previously written the epic Chinese-flavoured fantasy trilogy The Poppy War, published between 2018 and 2020. Her previous book Babel was widely acclaimed with themes of imperialism, racism and capitalism through a fantasy version of Oxford University in the 1800s, and Yellowface, a darkly satirical novel covering racial diversity in the New York publishing industry where a white author claimed her late Asian-American author friend's novel as her own and gets into hot water when it becomes a publishing sensation.

Kang will executive produce Katabasis as part of her overall development deal with Amazon MGM Studios.

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