While working in Thailand as a journalist, Mischa Berlinski began to write a history of the Lisu people’s conversion to Christianity when the book unexpectedly veered off into fiction to become Fieldwork (FSG, 2007), his first novel. A finalist for the National Book Award, Fieldwork is set in Northern Thailand and narrated by a fictional reporter, Mischa Berlinski, who becomes obsessed with the story of a woman anthropologist who has murdered a missionary. Born in New York, Mr. Berlinski studied classics at Berkeley and Columbia. Until recently, he has lived in Italy, but is now in Haiti, where his wife is a lawyer with the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission. He is working on a new novel, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2011, entitled Peacekeeping.