Susan Choi — the novelist

born 1969 · born in South Bend

The fame: Susan Choi's fifth novel, Trust Exercise (2019), won the National Book Award for Fiction — the prize that fixed her in the first rank of living American novelists. Her earlier novels run from The Foreign Student (1998) through American Woman (2003) and A Person of Interest (2008); she received the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award in 2010 and has taught writing at Yale. She came up the editorial side of the trade: after Yale and an MFA at Cornell, she worked for several years as a fact-checker at The New Yorker.

The tie, exactly: Choi was born in South Bend in 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. The honest statement is the pair: a South Bend birth and a childhood split between this city and Houston. She is printed here for the birth and the South Bend years, at exactly that strength.

Sources:

1. Cornell University, Department of English — "Born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish mother, Choi was raised there and in Houston, Texas"; the MFA of 1995, the New Yorker years, Trust Exercise and the 2019 National Book Award, the Sebald Award of 2010.
2. National Book Foundation — the 2019 award record.