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
彼得•海斯勒(中文名何伟,1969-)很早就有成为作家的梦想。他先在普林斯顿大学修文学,1992年获得罗德奖学金后赴英国牛津大学深造。1996年他作为“和平队”( The Peace Corps)队员到中国涪陵支教。这次支教还有两个更实际的目的:第一是体验生活,让写作才华在一个陌生...
評分原文链接 http://www.ilmare.cn/?p=225 看何伟(Peter Hessler)的这本书其实是一个非常愉快的过程,这本书是我的老师文中先生推荐的。拿到这本书是10月初的事情了。这两个月一直断断续续地看着River Town,这本书算是我看过的第一本真正意义上的原版书籍。 这是一个美国人描...
評分看这本书的时候,我的感受有点奇怪,因为我感觉到自己的思路明显是和Peter站在一边的。简单的说,我在他的书看到了以前的自己,而现在的我一直用一种带有西方价值观的思维方式去审视过去的,包括以前的教育和在这个教育体制下产生的我。虽然我并不来自四川,但是书里面提到的...
評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...
評分經理去年推薦瞭這本書給我看,我很後悔遲瞭一年纔看。1996年我讀小學,我在四川但我對其一無所知,過瞭十幾年覺得知道一點的時候,生活的社會變瞭許多,所以實際上還是一無所知。他是外國人,他沒有身在此山中,我讀到的是一雙異國眼裏的自己國傢,新鮮,震驚,卻仍然無法評價,可說的是作品記錄真實,行文誠懇,感情樸實,反正在當下我們已經沒辦法客觀去看這個國傢瞭。
评分政治話題上結論過快。作為一本遊記非常好看。看完後竟有些懊悔,自己的十年似乎還沒有他的兩年過得豐富和深入。要是早些年看到這本書,也許會對自己同樣在陌生環境下的處事方式有些反省。
评分參照中文版看下來 是我讀完的第一本英文書 彼得海斯勒文筆很平實 沒有太復雜生僻的詞匯 所以讀起來很舒服 對照大陸版 刪節非常少 成段刪除的隻有個彆幾次 大多數情況隻是刪除個彆幾句話 或是刪除改寫個彆幾個詞。基本上還是保持瞭作者的願意。 但是最後二十頁的後記完全不一樣 中文版主要少瞭作者開列的書單 以及少瞭從《甲骨文》中挪來的一篇文章。
评分一個中國人讀river town,笑不齣來是神經有問題,笑得齣來是沒心沒肺。
评分Best of the best
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