Peter Hessler
Peter Benjamin Hessler (born ) 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 Fellowship 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." Early life. Hessler grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and graduated from Hickman High School in 1988. He studied 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." During his junior year, he studied in John McPhee's writing seminar. After graduating from Princeton, Hessler received a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. The summer before graduating from Princeton, Hessler worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri. He wrote an extensive ethnography about the small town of Sikeston, which was published in the "Journal for Applied Anthropology". Career. Hessler joined the Peace Corps in 1996 and was sent to China for two  years to teach English at Fuling Teachers College, in a small city near the Yangtze River in Chongqing. He later worked in China as freelance writer for publications such as the "Wall Street Journal", the "Boston Globe", the "South China Morning Post", and "National Geographic". Hessler joined "The New Yorker" as a staff writer in 2000 and served as foreign correspondent until 2007. Hessler has written four books on China. "" (2001) is a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English 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, "" (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, 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 "" (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, where he 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 covered the Middle East for "The New Yorker". 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. He stated that he envisioned spending five or six years in the Middle East. While living there, he and his wife both learned Egyptian Arabic. 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. Hessler taught non-fiction writing at Sichuan University - Pittsburgh Institute. During his time in Chengdu, Hessler wrote several pieces for "The New Yorker" about how China handled  the COVID-19 pandemic. Because Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute declined to renew his teaching contract, he and his family moved back to Colorado at the end of the first semester of 2021. Personal life. Hessler is married to journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang. They are the parents of twin daughters born in 2010.