Suki Kim is the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea for immersive investigative journalism. She is an author of the New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Penguin Random House) and a novel, The Interpreter (FSG) which was a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, as well as anthologized in the Best American Essay series.
Kim is a recipient of a Guggenheim, a George Soros Open Society fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, a New America fellowship, a Berlin Prize at the American Academy, a Ferris fellowship at Princeton, and a Radcliffe fellowship at Harvard's Institute for Advanced Study. Her TED Talk has drawn six million viewers, and she was the 2020 Convocation Keynote speaker for Barnard College, Columbia University. She has been featured in the media around the world including CBS This Morning, BBC Breakfast Show, Christian Amanpour Show at CNN, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
She is a 2023-2024 Keith Haring Chair of Art and Activism at Bard College, she is at work on a nonfiction book (to be published by W.W. Norton), which was shortlisted for a J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize, given by Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
While at MacDowell in 2001 and 2002, Kim revised The Interpreter. In 2003 and 2006, she worked on her second novel. During her 2009 residency, she worked on a novel and a group of essays.
