Flashlight

Susan Choi was born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, the daughter of a Korean-American professor father and a Jewish-American mother. She studied literature at Yale University and received her MFA from Cornell, developing the formal ambition and psychological precision that would define her fiction writing career. She worked for several years as a fact-checker at The New Yorker before publishing her debut novel, The Foreign Student, in 1998. She has since published four novels and a children's book, and is now a professor of fiction writing at Yale.

The Foreign Student, set in the 1950s American South, follows a Korean man who has survived the Korean War in ways he cannot disclose and arrives as a student at a small Tennessee college, where he falls in love with a white woman from the Southern aristocracy. The novel's treatment of both characters' pasts — their separate experiences of trauma and social pressure — and the specific racial and cultural dynamics of the American South in the postwar period is handled with historical nuance and psychological depth.

American Woman, her second novel, is loosely based on the Patty Hearst kidnapping and its aftermath, following a Japanese-American radical and her involvement with a group of underground fugitives. The novel uses the historical material to explore questions about political conviction, violence, complicity, and the way the 1970s American left processed race alongside class struggle. Its engagement with Japanese-American history — specifically the internment camps that shaped Choi's fictional protagonist's family history — brings her own heritage into the novel's political concerns.

Trust Exercise, her fourth novel and the one that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019, is her most formally ambitious and challenging work. Set at a performing arts high school modelled on her own alma mater, the novel uses its self-referential structure — in which the second half explicitly undermines the first, reframing what the reader thought they understood — to examine how narrative shapes memory, how power operates within creative institutions, and who gets to tell which stories. It is a difficult, rewarding work that received significant critical attention for its structural boldness and the sharpness of its engagement with questions of consent and representation.