Quick Facts
Biography
Susan Choi (born 1969) is an American novelist. Choi was born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish mother. When she was nine years old, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved to Houston, Texas. Choi earned a B.A. in Literature from Yale University (1990) and an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
After receiving her graduate degree, she worked for The New Yorker as a fact checker, during this job she met her husband, the New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells.
Choi won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist of the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble for her first novel, The Foreign Student. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her historical fiction novel, American Woman. In 2010, she won the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award.
With David Remnick, she edited an anthology of short fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. Choi's second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her novel A Person of Interest was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. Her latest novel is My Education.
Awards and grants
- Asian American Literary Award for Fiction for The Foreign Student
- Steven Turner Award for The Foreign Student
- Barnes & Noble Discover Award finalist for The Foreign Student
- National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient (2001)
- Pulitzer Prize finalist 2004 for American Woman
- New York Public Library Young Lions Award finalist 2004 for American Woman
- Guggenheim Fellow (2004).
- PEN/W.G. Sebald Award (2010)
- Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction for My Education (2014)
- "Looking for summer reading? Lambda Literary Awards rain down a host of choices". Times-Picayune, June 3, 2014.
Books
- The Foreign Student (1998), ISBN 0-06-019149-X
- Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker (2000), ISBN 0-375-50356-0 (ed. with David Remnick)
- American Woman (novel) (2003), ISBN 0-06-054221-7
- A Person of Interest (2008), ISBN 978-0-670-01846-8
- My Education (2013), ISBN 0670024902