Suki Kim is a Korean American writer, a Guggenheim fellow and the author of the award-winning novel The Interpreter and a New York Times Bestselling literary nonfiction, . Kim is the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea for immersive journalism.
Biography and work
Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to the United States with her family at thirteen, moving to the outer boroughs of New York City. Kim is a naturalized American citizen. Kim graduated from Barnard College with a BA in English. Kim also lived in London for several years, studying East Asian literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She received a Fulbright Research Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Open Society Foundations Fellowship. Her debut novel, The Interpreter, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is a murder mystery about a young Korean-American woman, Suzy Park, living in New York City and searching for answers as to why her shopkeeper parents were murdered. Kim took a short term job as an interpreter in New York City when working on the novel to look into the life of an interpreter. The book received positive critic reviews and won the PEN Beyond Margins Award and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and was a runner up for a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Interpreter was translated into Dutch, French, Korean, Italian, and Japanese. Kim visited North Korea in February, 2002, to participate in the 60th Birthday Celebration of Kim Jong-il and wrote a cover essay for The New York Review of Books Kim accompanied the New York Philharmonic in February 2008, when they traveled to Pyongyang for the historical cultural visit to North Korea from the United States. Her article, "A Really Big Show: The New York Philharmonic's fantasia in North Korea," was published in Harper's Magazine in December 2008. Her second book, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite, is a work of literary nonfiction about her three and a half months in North Korea, teaching English to the future leaders of the country at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. The book sheds a new light on the understanding of the North Korean society by delving into its day-to-day life and provides unprecedented insights into the psychology of its ruling class, about whom the world knows very little. To promote the book, Kim appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on December 10, 2014. Her 2015 TED Talk, , received a standing ovation from its audience including Bill Gates and Al Gore, and has since drawn millions of viewers online. The book has resulted in some controversy, with reviewers saying that Kim potentially brought harm on the students she wrote about and has caused tensions between the university and the North Korean government. Kim has been accused of sensationalising stories and making false claims about university staff in her book. In June 2016, Kim confronted her critics in an essay in The New Republic. In the essay, she takes on racism and sexism in publishing and examines the "systematic undermining of her expertise" and what she called the misbranding of her investigative literary journalism book as a memoir. Her publisher subsequently removed "memoir" from the cover of Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite. Kim is a contributing editor at The New Republic. In March 2016, Kim profiled the GOP candidate Marco Rubio during his 2016 Presidential campaign for the magazine.
