The Chautauqua Prize Award Ceremony and Presentation – Flashlight by Susan Choi

Chautauqua Institution presents author Susan Choi with the 2026 Chautauqua Prize for her book Flashlight. Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize celebrates a book of fiction, or literary/narrative nonfiction, or a full length collection of poetry that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts.

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.”

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.

Susan 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.