Susan Choi interview: ‘Reading a great book feels like being dropped onto an alien planet’
The author of Flashlight, shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, on being haunted by childhood memories of a trip to Japan, and the richness of short novels
Susan Choi
Born in South Bend, Indiana, Susan Choi is the author of six novels
Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction – and was a US bestseller.
Her sixth novel, Flashlight, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, began as a short story in the New Yorker in 2020, and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
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In this ambitious book that deftly criss-crosses continents and decades, Susan Choi balances historical tensions and intimate dramas with remarkable elegance
— The Booker Prize 2025 judges on Flashlight
All nominated books
A thrilling, globe-spanning novel that mines questions of memory, language, identity and family
