Peter Hessler

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Peter Hessler (b. June 14, 1968) is an American writer and journalist. He is currently the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic. He has previously written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and other American newspapers and magazines. He is best known for his two books on China: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001), a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China, and Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present (2006), a collection of journalistic stories he wrote living in Beijing. His stories are about ordinary people's lives in China and are not politically themed.

Peter Hessler grew up in Columbia, Missouri. His father was a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, and his mother teaches history at Columbia College. He became interested in literature and writing while in high school. He went on to study English and creative writing at Princeton University, where, during his junior year, he took John McPhee's famed writing seminar. Hessler graduated in 1992 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at the University of Oxford. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps and spent the next two years teaching English at a local college in Fuling, China. Since 1999, he has lived in Beijing as a freelance writer. He is currently married to journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang.