Ridgway journalist Peter Hessler, whose “Letters from China” have been featured in The New Yorker since 2000, is one of 22 writers, artists and academics awarded this year’s MacArthur Foundation genius grants.

Like all MacArthur fellows, he may use the $500,000 grant however he chooses.

Hessler, 42, said Monday that the call from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation took him by surprise. He was so shocked that he “couldn’t make any sense at all” of the notes he scribbled during the conversation.

“When they called, I said this would be the first time in my life I’d had a regular income since I earned $125 a month in the Peace Corps,” said Hessler. “The timing is really ideal. We’re moving to Egypt next month. . . . It means I can do things the right way — not the way I did in China.”

In 1996, when Hessler, then a Peace Corps volunteer, first moved to China, he didn’t know the language. It takes at least a year of intense study, he said, to become fluent enough to conduct interviews and research.

Hessler’s books include “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze,” about remote Sichuan province cities flooded by Three Gorges Dam; “Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present,” a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award; and his latest, “Country Driving,” about a Chinese road trip.

His articles have been published in National Geographic, Atlantic Monthly and three editions of “Best American Travel Writing.” His story on basketball player Yao Ming appeared in “Best American Sports Writing.”

Hessler and his wife, Leslie T. Chang, left China in 2007 and moved to Ridgway, where Hessler rents a home and continues to write for The New Yorker. The current issue includes his “Letter from Nucla,” about southwestern Colorado pharmacist Don Colchord.

That article is a fine example of Hessler’s talents, said Willing Davidson, his editor at The New Yorker. “It tackles a totally unglamorous subject and just weaves this portrait, that all these little things add up and add up, and at the end, it all comes to fruition.”

The Hesslers plan to put everything they own in storage before moving to Cairo in October with their 16-month-old twin daughters.

Hessler hopes to live in Egypt for five years, learning Arabic and studying the cultural wake of this year’s Arab Spring revolution.