RO Kwon Books in Order

R.O. Kwon was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up mostly in Los Angeles. Her family’s Korean community was closely tied to church, and faith shaped her childhood in a big way. She has lived most of her life in the United States.

For years, Kwon expected religion to shape her future, too. She was raised deeply Christian and once planned to become a preacher or missionary. When she lost her faith at seventeen, it was not a casual change of mind. It was a painful break that left her grieving something she had loved and depended on.

She wanted to write novels from a young age, but the path did not seem obvious. At Yale, she studied economics, partly because writing did not feel like a practical career for a child of immigrants and because she had seen few Korean American writers held up as examples. After college, she took a management consulting job, lasted seven months, then went to graduate school for writing.

That detour helped clarify what she wanted.

Kwon spent ten years writing her first novel, The Incendiaries, working on it almost every day. Published in 2018, it follows Phoebe Lin, a grieving college student pulled toward a secretive religious group, and Will Kendall, the former Bible college student who loves her. The book puts faith, doubt, desire, shame, and political violence in the same tense space. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize.

Kwon is interested in the questions people cannot neatly settle.

Her second novel, Exhibit, arrived in 2024. It shifts to the Bay Area and follows photographer Jin Han after she meets Lidija Jung, a ballerina on leave from her company. Their connection opens up questions about art, marriage, family pressure, ambition, queerness, and the desires people learn to hide. Readers who come to Kwon’s work often find compact novels with intense relationships, characters under private strain, and big emotional stakes beneath the surface.

She also co-edited Kink, an anthology of fiction about desire, power, and sexuality, with Garth Greenwell. Outside her novels, Kwon has written essays and criticism for major magazines and newspapers. Her work has been translated into several languages, and she has received fellowships from organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo.

Kwon continues to teach and to work with other writers. She co-founded The Ministry of Words, a teaching collective, and has held visiting writing posts at colleges and universities. Across her work, she returns to belief and unbelief, the body, secrecy, art, and the strange things people will risk to feel fully alive.