Suki Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. She moved to New York and immigrated to United States with her family when she was 13. Kim is a naturalized American citizen.

Kim graduated from Barnard College in 1992, with a BA in English, minor in East Asian Literature. Right after her graduation, Kim went to London to study Korean literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies. After a year-and-a-half of graduate study in Korean literature, Kim returned to New York City to pursue a writing career. She received a Fulbright Research Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Her debut novel The Interpreter is a murder mystery about a young Korean American woman, Suzy Park, living in New York City and searching for answers as to why her shopkeeper parents were murdered. Kim took a short term job as an interpreter in New York City when working on the novel to look into the life of an interpreter. The book received positive critic reviews and won the PEN Beyond Margins Award and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.

Kim has written Op-Eds and essays on North Korea and South Korea, which have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, etc.

In February 2002, Kim was invited to North Korea for Kim Jong II’s 60th Birthday celebration as a US delegate. She wrote about her one week trip in North Korea in an essay "A Visit to North Korea" in the New York Review of Books.

Kim accompanied the New York Philharmonic in February 2008 when they traveled to Pyongyang for the historical cultural visit to North Korea from United States, her article “A Really Big Show: The New York Philharmonic’s fantasia in North Korea” was published in the Harper's Magazine in December 2008.