Susan Choi 's first novel, 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 for Fiction. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education , received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise , won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction - and was a US bestseller.

Flashlight began as a short story and won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. Choi lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University.