Peter Hessler | |
---|---|
Born | June 14, 1969 |
Pen name | 何伟 (Hé Wěi) (in China) |
Occupation | Writer, journalist, runner |
Language | English, Chinese, Egyptian Arabic |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Princeton University Mansfield College, Oxford |
Notable works | |
Notable awards | MacArthur Fellowship Kiriyama Prize Nominated for National Book Award for Nonfiction |
Spouse | Leslie T. Chang |
Children | 2 |
Peter Benjamin Hessler [1] (born June 14, 1969) 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." [2]
Hessler grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and graduated from Hickman High School in 1988. In 1992, he graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in English after completing a senior thesis titled "Dead Man's Shoes and Other Stories." [3] During his junior year, he studied in John McPhee's writing seminar. [4] After graduating from Princeton, Hessler received a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. [5]
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 Society for Applied Anthropology . [6]
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. [7] [8] 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 . [9] Hessler joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000 and served as foreign correspondent until 2007. [10]
Hessler has written four books on China. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001) is a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China. Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time 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, Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory (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 not motivated by politics, [5] 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 Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (2013), which, like his previous works, also covers China's ordinary people and life.
Hessler left China in 2007 and settled in Ridgway, Colorado, [11] 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 . [12] In an interview upon being named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2011, he expressed his intention to spend much of the next year learning Arabic. [13] He said he envisioned spending five or six years in the Middle East. [14] While living there, he and his wife both learned Egyptian Arabic. [15] 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. [16] He taught nonfiction writing at Sichuan University - Pittsburgh Institute. [17] [18] [19] 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, after some of his students reported Hessler's class, he and his family moved back to Colorado at the end of the first semester of 2021. [20] [21]
Hessler is married to journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang. [22] [23] They have two children, [4] [14] twin daughters Natasha and Ariel, whom Hessler featured in a June 2023 New Yorker article. [24]
Sichuan is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the Sichuan Basin and the easternmost part of the Tibetan Plateau between the Jinsha River on the west, the Daba Mountains in the north and the Yungui Plateau to the south. Sichuan's capital city is Chengdu. The population of Sichuan stands at 83 million. Sichuan neighbors Qinghai to the northwest, Gansu to the north, Shaanxi to the northeast, Chongqing to the east, Guizhou to the southeast, Yunnan to the south, and the Tibet Autonomous Region to the west.
Chengdu, alternatively romanized as Chengtu, is a sub-provincial city which serves as the capital of the Chinese province of Sichuan. With a population of 20,937,757 inhabitants during the 2020 Chinese census, it is the fourth most populous city in China, and it is the only city apart from the four direct-administered municipalities with a population of over 20 million. It is traditionally the hub of Western China.
John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World. In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
Fuling District is a district in central Chongqing, China. As the second largest city in Chongqing, the area is known for zha cai, a hot pickled mustard tuber, as well as serving as the location of former U.S. Peace Corps teacher Peter Hessler's best-selling memoir River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.
Sichuan University (SCU) is a national key public research university in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. The university is wholly funded by the Ministry of Education.
The Sichuan Basin, formerly transliterated as the Szechwan Basin, sometimes called the Red Basin, is a lowland region in southwestern China. It is surrounded by mountains on all sides and is drained by the upper Yangtze River and its tributaries. The basin is anchored by Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in the west, and the direct-administered municipality of Chongqing in the east. Due to its relative flatness and fertile soils, it is able to support a population of more than 100 million. In addition to being a dominant geographical feature of the region, the Sichuan Basin also constitutes a cultural sphere that is distinguished by its own unique customs, cuisine and dialects. It is famous for its rice cultivation and is often considered the breadbasket of China. In the 21st century its industrial base is expanding with growth in the high-tech, aerospace, and petroleum industries.
Shu (Chinese: 蜀; Sichuanese Pinyin: Su2; former romanization: Shuh), also known as Ancient Shu (Chinese: 古蜀) in historiography, was an ancient kingdom in what is now Sichuan Province. It was based on the Chengdu Plain, in the western Sichuan basin with some extension northeast to the upper Han River valley. To the east was the Ba tribal confederation. Further east down the Han and Yangtze rivers was the State of Chu. To the north over the Qinling Mountains was the State of Qin. To the west and south were tribal peoples of little military power.
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson by the American writer Robert Caro. Four volumes have been published, running to more than 3,000 pages in total, detailing Johnson's early life, education, and political career. A fifth volume is expected to deal with the bulk of Johnson's presidency and post-presidential years. The series is published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Lucy Chao or Zhao Luorui was a Chinese poet and translator.
Leslie T. Chang is a Chinese-American journalist and the author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008). A former China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she has been described as "an insightful interpreter of a society in flux."
Liao Yiwu is a Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet. He is a critic of China's Communist regime, for which he was imprisoned in 1990. His books, several of which are collections of interviews with ordinary people from the lower rungs of Chinese society, were published in Taiwan and Hong Kong but are banned in mainland China; some have been translated into Spanish, English, French, German, Polish and Czech. He has been living in Germany since April 2011.
Chen Mengjia was a Chinese scholar, poet, paleographer and archaeologist. He was considered the foremost authority on oracle bones and was Professor of Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Xing Xin,, is a contemporary Chinese artist based in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, involved in installation and performance art. Xing Xin started as a performance artist in 2003, with an academic background in sculpture, and is currently teaching performance art, video art, and installation in Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.
Li Xueqin was a Chinese historian, archaeologist, and palaeographer. He served as Director of the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Professor of the Institute of Sinology of Tsinghua University, Chairman of the Pre-Qin History Association of China, and participated in the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze is a 2001 book by Peter Hessler. It documents his Peace Corps teaching assignment at Fuling Teachers College in Fuling, Sichuan, which started in 1996 and lasted for two years; Fuling is now part of Chongqing municipality.
List of works by or about Peter Hessler, American journalist.
Xu Mengjia is a former Chinese politician who spent most of his career in Southwest China's Sichuan province. He was investigated by the Chinese Communist Party's anti-graft agency in December 2013. Previously he served as the Communist Party Secretary of Ya'an.
Suanla chaoshou is a dish of Sichuan cuisine that consists of a spicy sauce over boiled, meat-filled dumplings. Suanla means "hot and sour," and chaoshou is what these particular large wontons are called in the Chinese province of Sichuan.
Fuling Catholic Church is a Roman Catholic church located in Fuling District of the city of Chongqing, West China. In the West, it's best known for the description given by Peter Hessler in his book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001).
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