Peter Hessler

Peter Benjamin Hessler[1] (born (1969-06-14)June 14, 1969) is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of four books about China and has contributed numerous articles to The New Yorker and National Geographic, among other publications. In 2011, Hessler received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in recognition and encouragement of his "keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China."[2] He's also well known in China as a writer and journalist under the Chinese name 何伟 (Hé Wěi).

Peter Hessler
Born (1969-06-14) June 14, 1969
OccupationWriter, journalist
LanguageEnglish, Chinese, Egyptian Arabic
NationalityAmerican
Alma materPrinceton University
Mansfield College, Oxford
Notable works
  • River Town
  • Oracle Bones
  • Country Driving
  • Strange Stones
Notable awardsMacArthur Fellowship
Kiriyama Prize
Nominated for National Book Award for Nonfiction
SpouseLeslie T. Chang

Early life

Peter Hessler grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and graduated from Hickman High School in 1988. He went on to study at Princeton University, where he graduated with an A.B. in English in 1992 after completing a senior thesis titled "Dead Man's Shoes and Other Stories."[3] During his junior year, he studied in John McPhee's writing seminar, which Hessler described as a "revelation."[4] After graduating from Princeton, Hessler received a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford.[5]

The summer before graduating from Princeton, Hessler worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri. He wrote an extensive ethnography about a small town called Sikeston, which was published in the Journal for Applied Anthropology.[6]

Career

Hessler joined the Peace Corps in 1996 and was sent to China for two years to teach English at Fuling Teachers College, a teachers college in Fuling, a small city near the Yangtze River in Chongqing.[7][8] He later worked in China as freelance writer for numerous publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the South China Morning Post, and National Geographic.[9] Hessler joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000 and served as foreign correspondent for the same publication until 2007.[10]

He is best known for his four books on China. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001) is a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China. Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (2006) features a series of parallel episodes featuring his former students, a Uighur dissident who fled to the U.S., and the archaeologist Chen Mengjia who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. His third book, Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory (2010), is a record of Hessler's journeys driving a rented car from rural northern Chinese counties to the factory towns of southern China, and the significant economic and industrial growth taking place there. While his stories are about ordinary people's lives in China and are not motivated by politics,[5] they nevertheless touch upon political issues or the lives of people who encountered problems during the Cultural Revolution, one example being that of the story of the archaeologist Chen Mengjia and his wife, poet and translator Zhao Luorui. In 2013, he published Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (2013), which, consistently with his previous works, also covers China's ordinary people and life.

Hessler left China in 2007 and settled in Ridgway, Colorado[11] and has continued to publish articles in The New Yorker on topics including the Peace Corps in Nepal and small towns in Colorado.

In October 2011, Hessler and his family moved to Cairo, where he has been covering the Middle East for The New Yorker.[12] In an interview upon being named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2011, Hessler expressed his intention to spend much of the next year learning Arabic.[13] He has stated that he envisions spending five or six years in the Middle East.[14] While living there, he and his wife both learned Egyptian Arabic. [15] In 2019 he published The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution , a book detailing his experiences of Egypt during the Arab Spring. In August 2019, Hessler and his family moved to Chengdu in southwest China.[16] Hessler taught Non-fiction writing at Sichuan University - Pittsburgh Institute there.[17][18][19]

Personal life

Hessler is married to journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang.[20][21] They are the parents of twin daughters born in 2010.[4][14]

Bibliography
Main article: Peter Hessler bibliography

References
  1. Press, The Associated (1991-12-09). "32 U.S. Rhodes Scholars Are Selected to Study in Oxford for 1992". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-06-05.
  2. "MacArthur Fellows Program: Meet the 2011 Fellows". September 20, 2011. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved 20 September 2011.
  3. Hessler, Peter (1992). "Dead Man's Shoes and Other Stories". Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2011/09/journalist_peter_hessler_wins.php
  5. As stated by Hessler in "Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present", John Murray Publishers, London, 2006.
  6. 2006 National Book Award Finalist, Nonfiction
  7. Hessler, Peter. "The Peace Corps Breaks Ties with China". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  8. Hessler, Peter (2001). River Town: two years on the Yangtze. Harper Collins.
  9. "Travel Writer: Peter Hessler".
  10. Peter Hessler, The New Yorker Archived 2014-07-03 at the Wayback Machine
  11. Times: An interview with Peter Hessler - Hot Metal Bridge Retrieved 2016.11-13.
  12. https://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/09/peter-hessler-and-kay-ryan-receive-macarthur-genius-grants.html
  13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQq2dtzpt2o
  14. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2011-04/01/content_12262713.htm
  15. "Talk Like an Egyptian", Letter from Cairo, New Yorker, April 17, 2017
  16. Foley, Dylan (August 28, 2019). "Journalist Peter Hessler on Moving to Egypt After the Revolution". Literary Hub (Literary Hub). Retrieved 30 August 2019.
  17. "《寻路中国》作者何伟回来了，全家定居成都，任教四川大学" [Peter Hessler, the author of Country Driving, returned and his family settled in Chengdu to teach at Sichuan University]. The Paper (in Chinese). 30 August 2019. Retrieved 30 August 2019.
  18. "Peter Hessler". Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute. Retrieved 10 September 2019.
  19. Bures, Frank (2019-10-16). "Unearthing the Story: An Interview with Peter Hessler". Longread. Retrieved 23 October 2019.
  20. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-05-20. Retrieved 2010-12-07.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  21. "MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant' recipients". Archived from the original on October 16, 2011.
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