Suki Kim is an investigative journalist and a novelist and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea for immersive journalism. Born and raised in South Korea, Kim has traveled to North Korea since 2002, and in 2011, she lived in Pyongyang undercover for six months with the country's future leaders during the final year of Kim Jong-il’s reign; Suki Kim's New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, Penguin Random House) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive gulag nation.

Kim’s first novel, The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was the winner of a PEN Open Book Award and a finalist for a PEN Hemingway Prize, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Harper's, Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New Republic where she is a contributing editor. One of her acclaimed essays, "The Reluctant Memoirist" (The New Republic, 2016) exposed racism and orientalism in publishing as well as the systematic undermining of female expertise, and brought the publishing giant, Penguin Random House, her own publisher, to formally correct the mislabelling of her book. Her investigation for New York Magazine (voted “Best Investigative Reporting 2017” by Longreads) of the sexual and racial harassment at the WNYC New York Public Radio, the nation's largest public radio station, led to its internal shakedown, from the dismissal of its longest-serving program hosts to the stepping down of its President and CEO after 23 years in her job, as well as ushering the first woman of color, in the station's 100-year history, as a solo host of a national news program. In 2018, the Best American Essays series published her essay on fear, and in 2020, for a New Yorker feature, Kim broke an interview with Adrian Hong, the elusive leader of the first ever North Korean opposition who spoke to her while on the run from the US Department of Justice.

Kim is a recipient of a Guggenheim, a George Soros Open Society fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, a New America national fellowship, and the Berlin Prize at the American Academy. Recently, she was a Radcliffe fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Ferris professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University. Her TED Talk has drawn near 6 million viewers, and she was the 2020 Convocation Keynote speaker for Barnard College, Columbia University. She has been featured in the media around the world, from CNN, BBC, MSNBC including shows ranging from CBS This Morning, Christian Amanpour Show and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. A 2023-2024 Keith Haring Chair of Art and Activism at Bard College, she is at work on a nonfiction book (to be published by W.W. Norton), which was shortlisted for a J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize, given by Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.