Suki Kim

Suki Kim spent six months in 2011 teaching English to the sons of the North Korean elite at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, an institution run by evangelical Christians with the state's permission, and she was reporting the whole time. Without You, There Is No Us came out of it in 2014. The students lied to her constantly and easily, about the internet, about their holidays, about the world, and she came to think they could not tell which parts they believed. Kim has argued publicly and at length that Crown packaged the book as a memoir when she had written investigative journalism, and that the reclassification cost it the seriousness it was owed; she has since written about how often women's reporting is read as personal experience. Born in Seoul in 1970 and brought to America at thirteen, she also wrote the novel The Interpreter.