Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos is a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, and a foreign correspondent and China specialist, based in Washington, D.C. Since 2008, he has been a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where he covers foreign affairs and politics. His first book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), based on eight years of living in Beijing, won the National Book Award. From 2008 to 2013, he was The New Yorker’s China correspondent. His subjects included the reconstruction of a train crash that exposed corruption; a group of Chinese tourists on their first trip to Europe; and a barber who set out to beat the house in Macau. For four years, he also wrote the Letter from China blog for newyorker.com.

Osnos has written from elsewhere in East Asia; his article, “The Fallout,” on the effects of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, won a 2012 Overseas Press Club Award. Previously, he worked as Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, where he was part of a team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Before his assignment to China, he worked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq. He has also contributed to “This American Life” and been a correspondent for “Frontline/World.” He is the recipient of the Osborn Elliott Prize and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists. His work is anthologized in “The Best American Writing on Nature and Science 2010,” “The Best Spiritual Writing 2012” and “Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land.” In 2013, Osnos delivered the Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. He is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Based in Washington since 2013, Osnos writes about money in politics, and the formation of American foreign policy. His article, “Chemical Valley,” examined the role of lobbying and campaign contributions behind a chemical leak in West Virginia. His profile subjects include Vice President Joe Biden, legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Osnos is a frequent guest on television and radio, including “Charlie Rose”, “Fareed Zakaria GPS”, National Public Radio and “PBS NewsHour.”

Born in London, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998, with a concentration in government.