Celebrated Author Will Give Public Reading at Chautauqua Institution on July 24

Chautauqua Institution proudly announces Flashlight (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Susan Choi as the 2026 winner of The Chautauqua Prize.  

Awarded annually since 2012, the Prize celebrates a book of fiction, literary/narrative nonfiction or a book-length collection of poetry that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and honors the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. As the author of this year’s winning book, Choi receives $7,500 and will be presented with the Prize during a celebratory event and public reading at 3:30 p.m. EDT Friday, July 24, in Chautauqua’s Hall of Philosophy. Flashlight was chosen as the 2026 Prize winner from a list of seven finalists and 362 total submissions by an independent jury, which for 2026 included award-winning writers Oliver de la Paz, Glory Edim, Jillian Hanesworth and Kao Kalia Yang as guest judges.   

“Winning The Chautauqua Prize is a thrill and an honor, but it is also much more. I know firsthand how valued the arts are at Chautauqua,” Choi said. “When my children were small, I took them to the Amp to hear the symphony, knowing it was OK if they dozed off before the concert was over — they were still soaking up the music, as we can’t help but soak up the cultural and artistic life at Chautauqua just by setting foot there. Chautauqua is a magical place, and I’ve been so grateful to share in its magic. Thank you again for this incredible honor.” 

Flashlight is an expansive, ambitious, multigenerational novel that is equal parts historical fiction, family saga and bildungsroman. It is a story of secrets, shadows and absences that reverberate across time and continents. As the novel progresses, shifting perspective from one character to the next, we learn more about a family who has not only lost a husband and father, but has been severed from their pasts in unfathomable ways.  

Readers follow this family from Indiana, to Massachusetts, to North Korea and Japan across decades. Slowly, we learn more about Serk before his disappearance, an ethnically Korean man raised in Japan and a lonely academic who has lost touch with his family who chose to repatriate into North Korea following the promises of the postwar Pyongyang. We witness the choices his American wife, Anne, made in her youth that transformed her into a woman of acerbic attitudes, which alienate her daughter, Louisa, and illegitimate son, Tobias. We also experience Louisa’s struggles to understand and find a place within the world after the loss of her father, Serk, at ten and as she navigates her estrangement from her mother. 

The 2026 independent jury declared the book “a sprawling, masterfully and meticulously written novel that deals with language, cultural alienation and political intrigue centering a family contending with distance, time and space.” During jury deliberations they called Flashlight “a triumph of narrative craft and an ode to the power of the stories within us all.” 

Kao Kalia Yang, one of this year’s guest judges, lauded the novel as a “complicated, highly readable work featuring strong prose and a well-defined vision.” Yang, whose memoir The Song Poet was named a 2017 Chautauqua Prize finalist and CLSC selection, appreciated the story for its “cinematic qualities” and “deep excavation of memory and divided families.” 

Similarly, guest judge and memoirist Glory Edim called the book “intriguing, exciting, and heartbreaking.” She said that Flashlight is a work of fiction that can “easily invoke conversations about family dynamics, history, geopolitics, loss and grief, coming-of-age stories and more.”  

Guest judge and award-winning poet Oliver de la Paz called Flashlight a “compelling, beautifully written, character-driven novel” that builds drama and captivation for readers as they, too, follow the ripples and ruptures of “various generational traumas,” family turmoil and international intrigue.  

“It is a book that I’m still thinking deeply about,” said guest judge and Emmy award-winning poet Jillian Hanesworth. “Flashlight is a page-turner, tremendously moving and a testament to the power of voice and personal stories in overcoming the encroachment of structures and systems in our lives beyond our control.”  

Since first appearing on bookshelves in June 2025, Flashlight has been named a finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and longlisted for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. It has also been named one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of the 2025, a TeaTime and Get Lit Book Club Pick and a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Time, New York, The Washington Post, NPR,  Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Elle, Town & Country, Oprah Daily, The New York Post, 48 Hills, Financial Times, The Economist, Esquire (UK), Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, PEN America, The Chicago Public Library and Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

The Chautauqua Prize, awarded for the 15th time this year, has been inspired since its inception by the late literary and entertainment industry attorney Michael I. Rudell and his wife, Alice. Previous winners include The Sojourn by Andrew Krivák (2012); Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan (2013); My Foreign Cities: A Memoir by Elizabeth Scarboro (2014); Redeployment by Phil Klay (2015); Off the Radar: A Father’s Secret, a Mother’s Heroism, and a Son’s Quest by Cyrus Copeland (2016); The Fortunes: A Novel by Peter Ho Davies (2017); The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich (2018); All the Names They Used for God: Stories by Anjali Sachdeva (2019); Out of Darkness, Shining Light: A Novel by Petina Gappah (2020); Having and Being Had by Eula Biss (2021); All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner (2022); The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2023); The Reformatory: A Novel by Tananarive Due (2024); and Whale Fall: A Novel by Elizabeth O’Connor (2025). 

Winners of The Chautauqua Prize are noteworthy for their capacity to open inquiry and create an inviting space for conversation among many kinds of readers, making the books an ideal vehicle to engage in Chautauqua Institution’s historic tradition of reading and discussion in community. Chautauqua’s other annual literary award, the Chautauqua Janus Prize, celebrates experimental writers who have not yet published a book. Taken together, these prizes ensure that both tradition and innovation live at the heart of a Chautauqua reader’s life of learning. 

Details on The Chautauqua Prize are available online at prize.chq.org. Books published in 2026 will be accepted as submissions for the 2027 Prize beginning in September 2026. 

Praise for Flashlight 
 

“A major world writer . . . Choi is in thrilling command.” 
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review 
 
“[Choi’s] best novel yet.” 
—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune 
 
“Outstanding . . . Its dogged stumbling toward truth is touching and thrilling, often both at once . . . [A] major American novel.” 
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal 
 
“[A] mystery kicks off Flashlight, propelling the plot forward, backward and sideways . . . [Choi is] a twenty-first-century Émile Zola . . . The novel ranks among her best work.” 
—Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times 
 
“[Flashlight] will leave readers guessing until (almost) the very end . . . A sweeping, unsettling portrait of one family caught in the throes of change and torn apart by tragedy.” 
—Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle 
 
“Engrossing . . . A smart, beautifully written novel about what can be lost when you never really know what you had.” 
—Town & Country 
 
“Will make your head spin in the best way.” 
—Dakota Johnson, TeaTime Book Club, on Instagram 
 
“A hugely ambitious book . . . with insight into shocking, real-life events that deserve the attention Choi brings to them.” 
—Chris Hewitt, The Minnesota Star Tribune 
 
“Flashlight . . . has the wide-legged feel of turn-of-the-century fiction: domestically sprawling, geopolitically bold . . . A truth-rattling rupture . . . [It] is all kinds of big: capacious of intent and scope and language and swagger.” 
—Beejay Silcox, The Guardian 
 
“Expansive . . . Flashlight explores the history and mysteries of one family . . . [Their] personal trajectories are interwoven with those of global politics in a way that feels both wrenchingly tragic and entirely credible.” 
—The New Yorker 
 
“A propulsive story about family secrets and displacement.” 
—Wadzanai Mhute, The Boston Globe 
 
“Choi masterfully delivers a story that feels both deeply personal and profoundly moving. Taking the time to sink into Flashlight’s bold exploration of grief, identity, and survival will absolutely be worth the investment.” 
—Allison Fabian Derfner, Goop 
 
“A great big ambitious novel . . . Franzen-like . . . Rooted in intense historical research but never dry, I’m ready to declare that Flashlight is that elusive type of book that so many readers I know are always looking for: a big fat novel to get lost in.” 
—Maris Kreizman, The Maris Review 
 
“Magnificent . . . An ode to the difficult choices we make to build a life and the ways in which they all can come falling down in a moment.” 
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books 
 
“At once a domestic novel and a spy thriller . . . Flashlight is a novel in which the past will not be past.” 
—Angelo Hernandez Sias, Bookforum 
 
“The epic history of a fractured American family . . . Choi’s prose shines with poetry and intelligence.” 
—Jasmine Vojdani, New York 
 
“A captivating examination of family and belonging.” 
—E! News 
 
“Aching, beautiful, utterly compelling.” 
—Dan Sheehan, Literary Hub 
 
“A rich generational saga that teems with intelligence, curiosity and, in terms of reading, sheer pleasure.” 
—Catherine Taylor, Financial Times 
 
“[Choi’s] most ambitious effort yet.” 
—Emma Specter, Vogue 
 
“[Flashlight] creeps up on you, so you don’t quite register how deeply it’s gotten its hooks in you until days later, when you’re still thinking about it.” 
—Constance Grady, Vox 
 
“A sweeping, multilayered story that moves through decades and across the globe . . . The masterful Flashlight . . . offers a profound look at family ties, perspective, and memory.” 
—Real Simple 
 
“A writer at the top of her game.” 
—Emily Bowles, Library Journal 
 
“[Flashlight] pushes the boundaries of family, ethnicity, society, country, and history . . . [Choi] brilliantly shines the titular flashlight on each of her characters.” 
—Terry Hong, Booklist (starred review) 
 
“Choi is a writer you can trust to make the journey worthwhile . . . This aptly titled novel illuminates dark passages both fictional and real.” 
—Kirkus Reviews 
 
“A tale of espionage and global conflict, and the heartrending ways in which world struggles play out in individual lives.” 
—Jennifer M. Brown, Shelf Awareness 
 
“This gripping story of a family in crisis is tough to shake.” 
—Publishers Weekly 
 
“A brilliant feat of storytelling . . . Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I’m in awe.” 
—Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls 

 
ABOUT THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE    

Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize draws upon Chautauqua Institution’s considerable literary legacy to celebrate a book that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. The author of the winning book will receive $7,500 and will participate in a Prize ceremony and reading on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution during the 2026 Summer Assembly. For more information, visit prize.chq.org.     

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY ARTS    

With a history steeped in the literary arts, Chautauqua Institution is the home of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, which honors at least nine outstanding books of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry with community discussions and author presentations every summer. Further literary arts programs at Chautauqua include the summer-long workshops, craft lectures and readings from some of the very best author-educators in North America at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. Chautauqua Literary Arts is led by the Michael I. Rudell Director of the Literary Arts, an endowed chair established in memory of a beloved Chautauquan who, among other things, inspired Chautauqua’s first literary award, The Chautauqua Prize.   

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION    

Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York State that comes alive each summer — and year round through the CHQ Assembly online platforms — with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue.    

###