Profile

Peter Savodnik

has written for The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Business Week, Harper's, The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, Wired, W, Time, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post and Commentary, among other venues.

He is working on a book on Lee Harvey Oswald's Soviet foray, slated to be published this year by Basic Books. His article, "The Chessboard Killer," which was first published in GQ, was anthologized in The Best American Crime Reporting 2010. In Winter 2011, he taught a class at Middlebury College on politics and literature, focusing on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done?

Previously, Savodnik lived in Moscow and traveled extensively in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan and the Russian Far East. Among the highlights of his time in the former Soviet Union was a five-week trip on the Trans-Mongolian railroad, beginning in Moscow and ending in Beijing; a ski vacation in Krasnaya Polyana; and a road trip through the Ukrainian steppe. He graduated from Middlebury College in 1994 and received his master's from the University of Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, in 1999.