Peter Hessler has received the 2008 National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting, a 2011 Macarthur Fellowship, and the 2001 Kiriyama Prize. He is the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip; Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West; and Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. He is a contributing writer for National Geographic and a staff writer at The New Yorker, for which he has served as the Beijing, China correspondent from 2000 to 2007 and currently covers Egypt.