2019 National Book Award For Fiction Handed To Susan's Choi's Trust Exercise

There's one more novel that came up into the spotlight this Wednesday. The 70th annual National Book Awards have announced their winners. The award for fiction went to Susan Choi's Trust Exercise who beat other four rivals in the category: Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Sabrina & Corina: Stories, Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Laila Lalami's The Other Americans and Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth.

According to the Judges, "Trust Exercise by Susan Choi blends the intellectual rigor of post-modern technique with a story that is timely, mesmerizing, and, in the end, unsettling. The exploration of different character perspectives lays bare the myth-making of the self and the damage that storytelling can do to others. Choi’s virtuoso accomplishment on the sentence level is often extraordinary - and pivots in astonishing and non-traditional directions while conforming to traditional ideas of excellence."

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and Camp Tiger, her first book for children, came out in 2019. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.