Sook.Nyul Choi author page

Sook Nyul Choi biography

Sook Nyul Choi is a Korean American children’s author whose fiction draws on her experiences in Korea during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War. Born in Pyongyang, she later moved to the United States to attend college, graduating from Manhattanville College in 1962. She subsequently taught in public and parochial schools in New York and Massachusetts for around 20 years.

Her debut novel, Year of Impossible Goodbyes, was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991. Partly based on Choi’s own experiences, it follows ten-year-old Sookan and her family in Korea as Japanese occupation gives way to Soviet control and the family attempts to escape to South Korea. The novel became an ALA Notable Book and won the 1992 Judy Lopez Memorial Award.

Choi continued Sookan’s story in Echoes of the White Giraffe, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1993, in which the teenage Sookan is living as a refugee during the Korean War. Her other books include Gathering of Pearls and the picture books Halmoni and the Picnic, Yunmi and Halmoni’s Trip and The Best Older Sister.

Halmoni and the Picnic, illustrated by Karen M. Dugan and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1993, follows Korean American schoolgirl Yunmi as her recently arrived grandmother joins her class for a picnic in Central Park.