Peter Benjamin Hessler 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." He's also well known in China as a writer and journalist under the Chinese name .
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." During his junior year, he studied in John McPhee's writing seminar, which Hessler described as a "revelation." 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 a small town called 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, a teachers college in Fuling, a small city near the Yangtze River in Chongqing. 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. Hessler joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000 and served as foreign correspondent for the same publication until 2007. He is best known for his four books on China. ' is a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China. ' 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, ', 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 ', which, consistently with his previous works, also covers China's ordinary people and life. Hessler left China in 2007 and settled in Ridgway, Colorado 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. 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 has stated that he envisions 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 there.
Personal life
Hessler is married to journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang. They are the parents of twin daughters born in 2010.
