The Shape of Absence | Α conversation with Susan Choi

The B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music welcomes American novelist Susan Choi for a public conversation on writing and literature, memory, identity and absence, subject matters that run through a quarter-century of fiction and have made her writings one of the most demanding and penetrating bodies of work in contemporary American prose.

Born in 1969 in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and a Jewish American mother, Choi is the author of six novels in which personal history and History can never be cleanly separable. From The Foreign Student (1998), the story of a Korean student in the American South after the Korean War, to American Woman (2003), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Trust Exercise (2019), winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, her work returns insistently to the question of who is entitled to tell a story, and of what is lost, or invented, in the passage from experience to narrative.

Her most recent novel, Flashlight (2025), was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. It opens at night on a beach in Japan: a ten-year-old girl walks beside her father, who carries a flashlight; soon after, he is gone. From that originating absence unfolds a family chronicle that crosses continents and decades, moving between the Korean communities of postwar Japan, the American suburbs and the North Korean state.

The conversation will consider how absence operates in Choi’s writing not as a void but as a generative force: the missing father, the recollection that cannot be trusted, the identity formed in the interval between languages, nations and histories. It will also approach fiction as a form of memory work, a place where what official history leaves unrecorded may yet be held.

The event forms part of the Foundation’s Lectures & Conversations series for the 2026–2027 season. The conversation will be moderated by Stelios Vasilakis.

*Photo by Paul Myers

Thursday, October 15, 2026 | 8:00 pm

Admission: 10€

Language: English

About Susan Choi

Susan Choi is the author of six novels: The Foreign Student (1998, Asian American Literary Award), American Woman (2003, finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize), A Person of Interest (2008), My Education (2013), Trust Exercise (2019, National Book Award for Fiction) and Flashlight (2025, shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize). In 2010 she was the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. The short story from which Flashlight grew, first published in The New Yorker, won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2021. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.