Susan Choi

Susan Choi is an American novelist whose formally inventive literary fiction explores power, memory, and the nature of storytelling itself. Born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1969, she studied literature at Yale University and earned her MFA from Cornell University. She has taught at Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. Choi's novels include The Foreign Student, American Woman (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, inspired by the Patty Hearst kidnapping), A Person of Interest, My Education, and Trust Exercise (which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019). Trust Exercise is a structurally daring novel about two teenage drama students whose intense relationship is shaped — and exploited — by their charismatic teacher, with a mid-novel shift that forces readers to reconsider everything they thought they knew. Her fiction is characterised by its intellectual ambition, its willingness to challenge readers' assumptions, and its exploration of how we construct narratives about our own pasts. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers formally ambitious literary fiction that rewards close attention — novels where the way a story is told matters as much as what happens in it.