Evan Osnos

Life and career

Osnos was born in London, when his parents, Susan (née Sherer) Osnos and Peter L.W. Osnos, were visiting from Moscow, where his father was assigned as a correspondent for the Washington Post. Osnos graduated from Greenwich High School in 1994. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998.

In the summer of 1999, Osnos joined the Chicago Tribune as a metro reporter, and, later, a national and foreign correspondent. He was based in New York at the time of the September 11 attacks. In 2002, he was assigned to the Middle East, where he covered the Iraq War and reported from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. In 2005, he became the China correspondent. He was a guest on the Colbert Report in 2007 and 2011 to discuss China's changes. In 2008, he was part of a Chicago Tribune team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Osnos joined The New Yorker in September 2008 and served as the magazine’s China Correspondent until 2013. Osnos has contributed to the NPR radio show This American Life and the PBS television show Frontline. As The New Yorker's China correspondent, Evan maintained a regular blog called "Letter from China" and wrote articles about China’s young neoconservatives, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and the Wenzhou train crash. According to the Washington Post, "In the pages of the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has portrayed, explained and poked fun at this new China better than any other writer from the West or the East." He has received two awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Osborn Elliott Prize for excellence in journalism from the Asia Society. Osnos is among those featured Episodes 11 (Contradictions) and 12 (Follow the Money) of the USC U.S.-China Institute's Assignment:China series.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (2014), Osnos' first book, follows the lives of individuals swept up in China's "radical transformation", Osnos said, in an interview on Fresh Air in June 2014. He said Communist Party leaders abandoned "the scripture of socialism and they held on to the saints of socialism." The book won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction. Osnos left China in 2013, to write about politics and foreign affairs at The New Yorker. Among other topics, he has examined the politics behind a chemical leak in West Virginia and profiled Vice President Joe Biden.

Personal

Osnos is married to Sarabeth Berman, a graduate of Barnard College. Since July 2013, they have lived in Washington, D.C. Osnos' Chinese name is 欧逸文 (Ōu Yìwén). His father, Peter Osnos, is founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs, a publishing company.