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| Photo
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Peter Hessler
Oracle Bones: A Journey
Between China’s Past and Present
HarperCollins
About the Book
In a narrative
that moves between the ancient and the present,
the East and the West, Hessler tells the story
of twenty-first-century China as it opens its
doors to the outside world.
About the Author
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 l994, 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, 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 l996 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 non-fiction 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.
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