Susan Choi — six novels from a South Bend birth

BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 1969 · RAISED HERE AND IN HOUSTON

The tie. Susan Choi was born in South Bend on 28 January 1969, to a Korean father and a Jewish mother, and was raised in South Bend and in Houston, Texas, where the family moved during her childhood — Famous People carries the tie at that exact strength, and this entry keeps it. She took her degree at Yale and her MFA at Cornell, worked for several years as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, and has taught at Yale and in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. The fame is the books'; the birth and the South Bend years are this city's.

The novels, in order. The Foreign Student (HarperFlamingo, 1998), her first, is set in 1955 at a small college in the Tennessee mountains, where a young Korean man scarred by the war and the daughter of a wealthy Southern family meet; it won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction and the Steven Turner Award for a first novel, and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. American Woman (HarperCollins, 2003), drawn from the Patty Hearst kidnapping's underground years, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. A Person of Interest (Viking, 2008) was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award followed in 2010. My Education (Viking, 2013) won a Lambda Literary Award in 2014. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise (Henry Holt, April 2019), set among teenagers at an elite performing-arts high school in the 1980s, won the National Book Award for Fiction — the prize that fixed her standing, carried in full in Awards. Her sixth, Flashlight (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 3 June 2025), grew from her story "Flashlight," which won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021; the novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and won the Chautauqua Prize, with further finalist and shortlist placings — the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Orwell Prize among them — running into 2026. One of President Obama's favorite books of 2025, on his published list.

The rest of the shelf. With David Remnick she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker (Random House, 2000). Her one children's book stands with the picture books below: Camp Tiger (G. P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 21 May 2019), a forty-page picture book illustrated by John Rocco. Six novels, one anthology, one picture book: the largest single-author shelf any South Bend birth has produced in the modern record.

Sources:

1. Yale University, Department of English — Choi's curriculum vitae: the six books with publishers and years (HarperCollins 1998; HarperCollins 2003; Viking 2008; Viking 2013; Henry Holt 2019), the 1999 Asian-American Literary Award, the 2004 Pulitzer finalist placing, the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist placing.
2. Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, faculty books — The Foreign Student under its HarperFlamingo imprint; Trust Exercise, Henry Holt, 2019.
3. Penguin Random House — Camp Tiger (G. P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 21 May 2019), illustrated by John Rocco; the author's biography recording the Sebald and Lambda awards and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.
4. The Booker Prizes — Flashlight shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025 (Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom; Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States); Temple University library catalog for the FSG edition, 2025.
5. Princeton University, Program in Creative Writing — the Steven Turner Award and the Young Lions finalist placing; Cornell University — the MFA of 1995 and the 2019 National Book Award.