Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos is an author and staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is also co-host of The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of four books, beginning with Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the 2014 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, was a New York Times bestseller in 2025 and a finalist for the PEN America Literary Awards. Prior to The New Yorker, where he served for years as the magazine’s Beijing correspondent, he worked for the Chicago Tribune, where he was on teams of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 and 2008. Before his assignment to China, he worked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq. 

Osnos’ current book project (under contract with Scribner/Simon & Schuster) is a work of narrative nonfiction set amid the West Virginia Mine Wars. At the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, the Machine Age ran on the seemingly magical power of coal, the “black gold” that lit up Broadway and pulled trains over the Rockies. But the surging demand for energy ignited an inferno of violence, spying, and repression in Appalachia, culminating in the largest armed uprising since the Civil War. Osnos explores the human stakes and motives in a community driven apart, tensions ingrained in American history, and the dedication of those who defied efforts to erase this struggle from the record.

This bio reflects the fellow’s work and affiliations as of their fellowship year.

• Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder: A feature in The New Yorker about inequality, corruption, and political backlash.
• America Is Divided. Evan Osnos’ ‘Wildland’ Looks At How That Happened: An NPR Fresh Air interview with Evan Osnos about his book Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, exploring the widening divides between three places that shaped his understanding of America: Clarksburg, West Virginia; Greenwich, Connecticut; and Chicago, Illinois.