19 Facts About Suki Kim

Suki Kim is the author of two books: the award-winning novel The Interpreter and a book of investigative journalism, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite.

Suki Kim is currently a contributing editor at The New Republic.

Suki Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States with her family at thirteen.

Suki Kim graduated from Barnard College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

Suki Kim studied East Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Suki Kim has received a Fulbright Research Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Open Society Foundations Fellowship.

Suki Kim was a Ferris Journalism Fellow at Princeton University, where she was a visiting lecturer.

Suki 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.

Suki Kim visited North Korea in February 2002 to participate in the 60th birthday celebration of Suki Kim Jong-il.

Suki Kim documented this experience in a February 2003 cover essay for The New York Review of Books.

Suki 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.

Suki Kim's second book, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite, is a work of investigative journalism about her three and a half months in Pyongyang, where she taught English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology in 2011.

The book has resulted in some controversy, with reviewers claiming that Suki Kim brought harm on the students she wrote about, and that she caused tensions between the university and the North Korean government.

The university staff accused Suki Kim of making false claims about them.

However, Suki Kim addressed her critics in a June 2016 essay in The New Republic.

Suki Kim mentioned the shortcomings of labelling her second book as a memoir and the irony in reviewers dismissing this work for containing the components typically praised in investigative journalism.

Suki Kim's investigation led to the firing of two longterm WNYC hosts, Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz, as well as the eventual resignation of its CEO, Laura Walker, and Chief Content officer, Dean Cappello.

Suki Kim's article was voted as the Best Investigative Reporting of 2017 by Longreads.

In 2020, Suki Kim published an investigative feature in The New Yorker on Free Joseon, a group that has declared itself a provisional government for North Korea, and she was the first to interview the group's leader Adrian Hong while he was on the run from the Department of Justice.