Susan Choi is the author of five novels. Her first, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her most recent novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English.
While at MacDowell she continued work on her fifth novel (begun during a previous MacDowell residency), Trust Exercise, inspired by the life and times of her paternal grandfather, a prominent Korean intellectual of the 1930s and early 40s who was ostracized as a national traitor after the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Trust Exercise won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction.
