Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and, most recently, Country Driving. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He lives in Cairo.
Biography
Peter Hessler, one of four children, was born in 1969, in Pittsburgh, but moved shortly thereafter to Columbia, Missouri. His father is a recently retired professor of sociology at the University of Missouri, and his mother teaches history at Columbia College.
Hessler attended Princeton University, where he majored in English and Creative Writing. The summer before graduation, he worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri, where he wrote a long ethnography about a small town called Sikeston. This became his first significant publication, appearing in the Journal for Applied Anthropology.
In 1992, Hessler entered Oxford University, where he studied English Language and Literature at Mansfield College. After graduating in 1994, he traveled for six month in Europe and Asia. One of the highlights of that trip was taking the trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing. That journey resulted in his first published travel story, an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 1995. And that journey was his first introduction to China.
He spent the following year freelancing and attempting to write a book about his travels. Although the book didn't work out, he was able to publish travel stories in a range of newspapers, including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, and The Newark Star-Ledger, among others. In 1995, he received the Stratton Fellowship, a grant from the Friends of Switzerland and spent two months hiking 650 miles across the Alps. Afterwards he continued to freelance, writing travel stories for American newspapers while teaching freshman composition at the University of Missouri. He also organized volunteer projects for students on campus.
In 1996 he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to China. For two years, he taught English at a small college in Fuling, a city on the Yangtze River. While living in Fuling, he studied Mandarin Chinese and became proficient in the language.
After completing his Peace Corps service in 1998, he traveled to Tibet, where he researched a long article, "Tibet Through Chinese Eyes," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in February of 1999. Following that trip, he returned to Missouri and wrote River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. While working on the book, he continued to write travel stories for The New York Times and other newspapers. In March of 1999, Hessler decided to return to China independently and try to establish himself as a freelance writer.
Over the following years, he traveled widely in China and freelanced for a variety of publications. For a brief spell, he was accredited as the Boston Globe stringer in Beijing. In 2000, The New Yorker began publishing some of his stories; the following year, he became the first New Yorker correspondent to be accredited as a full-time resident correspondent in the People's Republic.
In 2000, Hessler also started researching stories for National Geographic Magazine. The first assignment was a story about Xi'an archaeology, which sparked his interest in researching antiquities. Subsequently he accepted an assignment for a story about China's bronze-age cultures, which led to his interest of the oracle bones of the Anyang excavations.
River Town was published in 2001. It won the Kiriyama Prize for outstanding nonfiction book about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. It was also a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover award, and in the United Kingdom it was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. The book has been translated into Korean, Thai, and Hungarian. The Hungarian translation won the Elle Literary Prize for nonfiction in 2004.
Peter Hessler's magazine stories have been selected for the Best American Travel Writing anthologies of 2001, 2004 and 2005, and also for the Best American Sports Writing anthology of 2004. "Chasing the Wall," a National Geographic story published in 2003, was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Hessler first conceived of Oracle Bones at the end of 2001 and spent the next four years researching and writing the book.
He currently lives in Beijing.
Author biography courtesy of HarperCollins.
Good To Know
"The only steady job I ever held in journalism was delivering the Columbia Missourian," Hessler revealed in our interview. "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was sixteen years old. Mary Racine, who taught sophomore English at Hickman High School, first encouraged me to take writing seriously. Mary Ann Gates taught juniors and Khaki Westerfield taught seniors; they were all remarkable teachers It makes a big difference to be encouraged at such an early stage."
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society.
Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
Third-place winner of Barnes & Noble's 2001 Discover Great New Writers Award for Nonfiction
昨晚在一个狠文艺的书店里遇见了何伟的《江城》,说实话我没想到这本书居然获准在大陆出版。而让我惭愧万分的是,当我买回家读完这本书的时候才发现这是它自2012年2月出版以来的第四次加印,我买的是第7万册到第10万册中的一本---如果再刷半年微博,估计我连第五版都会错过了。...
评分一、 在翻开这本书之前,我对它的内容一点概念也没有,在我的想象里,它大概是本游记,也可能是一个关于中国问题的文化层面的评论集。我完全没想到,它其实只是作者在涪陵的两年教书生涯的生活记录而已。 这多少让我有点失望。并不是这种形式有什么问题,只是它实在是太「容...
评分我本不想读任何写中国的书,如同不想读政治和哲学。对于世上的苦难,我仅觉得自己无奈无力;对于世上的精彩,也毫无吸引并不想参和;而对世道的愤怒和评判,更让人增加了保持沉默的力量。你一开口便落入与他们一样的偏见和市恩,人总是对别人的事表现的比自己的清楚。 无奈抱...
评分《江城》的阅读交织着惊奇与亲切,因为它与《寻路中国》无论异还是同都十分清晰。异,惊奇;同,亲切。 1996年—1998年间,二十七八岁彼得•海斯勒(中文名何伟)以“和平队(Peace Corps)”志愿者身份在四川涪陵师专担任英语老师。《江城》便是他对这段经历的纪录和思考...
评分他在具有虔诚信仰的家庭中长大,他具有虔诚的信仰。他在大学里学文学,他痛恨文学被可怕的教育体制和文学评论撕裂和肢解,失去了原来的优美。 他的梦想,是成为一个作家,但是在此之前,他想看看遥远的国度,也想为了他的信仰做一些工作。于是他选择作为一个志愿者,登上了去...
啊哈?很久以前读的了,怎么没标记啊……我喜欢的点很奇怪——那些学英文的学生写的有趣句子文章。
评分如果不是因为他吐槽文学批评我就给他五星了……
评分每个英语系男生上辈子都是没有护翼的卫生巾,周末放书评和书摘
评分没有足够的播客听,何伟的故事成了我近期生活的一部分。何时才能像他这样坦诚地记录、审视自己的生活
评分啊哈?很久以前读的了,怎么没标记啊……我喜欢的点很奇怪——那些学英文的学生写的有趣句子文章。
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