The 2025 shortlist for the Booker Prize, “the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction,” has been announced––and among the finalists is Flashlight, the newest novel by Writing Seminars Professor Susan Choi. The Booker Prize Foundation’s press release highlights the strength of this year’s shortlist, and had this to say about Choi and Flashlight:

“Susan Choi’s shortlisted novel Flashlight, her sixth book, began life as a short story published in The New Yorker, which went on to win the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. Choi, who was born in Indiana to a Korean father and Russian-Jewish mother, originally intended Flashlight to be a novella. At just under 450 pages, the novel moves between the post-war Korean immigrant community in Japan, to suburban America and the North Korean regime. Choi’s debut novel The Foreign Student won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, whilst her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction and was a bestseller in the US. In 2010, Choi was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. She has been described by The New York Times as ‘a major world writer’ with ‘a profound gift’.”

Click here to read Professor Choi’s interview with the Booker Prize Foundation.

Each author named to the shortlist will receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The announcement of the winning  novel  will take place on November 10th; the winner receives a prize of £50,000, or roughly $67,000. As reported by the New York Times, the Booker Prize “is one of the literary world’s most coveted awards, given each year to a novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland,” and previous winners include Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie, and onetime Writing Seminars professor J.M. Coetzee.

Flashlight was also recently nominated for this year’s National Book Award.