Evan Osnos

About the Speaker

New Yorker correspondent and National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos specializes in all things related to China. Based in Beijing from 2005 to 2013, he reported on the country's rise to power before sending his last dispatch from China to become The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, covering politics and foreign affairs.

Since joining The New Yorker, as the only staff writer in the Far East, Osnos has written in-depth profiles of many of China’s most influential cultural and business figures. “The Forbidden Zone,” his portrait of magazine editor, Hu Shuli, won the Mirror Award for profile writing. Osnos also authored the magazine’s blog “Letter from China.”

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction and Pulitzer Prize finalist Osnos' Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, was called “a splendid and entertaining picture of 21st-century China” by The Wall Street Journal. The San Francisco Chronicle said it was “by far the most thoughtful and well-crafted work on China written by an American journalist in recent years.”

Osnos chronicles the lives of ordinary citizens in the throes of dramatic change. To see the West through their eyes, he joined a Chinese bus tour of Europe. To understand what is on the minds of the world’s largest middle class, he profiled China’s psychoanalysts. He has written from elsewhere in Asia, and his piece “The Fallout,” about the events and aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown won a 2012 Overseas Press Club award.

Prior to The New Yorker, Osnos worked as the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series on product safety that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting on the global trade in unsafe imports.

In 2003 he embedded himself with the US Marines during the invasion of Iraq and spent two years as the Tribune’s Middle East Correspondent. He was the 2007 recipient of the Livingston Award, the nation’s leading prize for young journalists, as well as the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia, among other honors.

Osnos graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, National-Committee on US-China Relations, the Asia 21 project, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Poynter Fellow at Yale. A contributor to This American Life and Frontline, he appears frequently on Charlie Rose, Fareed Zakaria GPS, and The Colbert Report.