diff --git a/Lib/distutils/command/install_egg_info.py b/Lib/distutils/command/install_egg_info.py
index c8880310dfc..c2a7d649c0c 100644
--- a/Lib/distutils/command/install_egg_info.py
+++ b/Lib/distutils/command/install_egg_info.py
@@ -40,9 +40,8 @@ class install_egg_info(Command):
                          "Creating "+self.install_dir)
         log.info("Writing %s", target)
         if not self.dry_run:
-            f = open(target, 'w')
-            self.distribution.metadata.write_pkg_file(f)
-            f.close()
+            with open(target, 'w', encoding='UTF-8') as f:
+                self.distribution.metadata.write_pkg_file(f)
 
     def get_outputs(self):
         return self.outputs
diff --git a/Lib/distutils/dist.py b/Lib/distutils/dist.py
index 02cd79ba2f6..8ca5b6f4f12 100644
--- a/Lib/distutils/dist.py
+++ b/Lib/distutils/dist.py
@@ -1010,11 +1010,9 @@ class DistributionMetadata:
     def write_pkg_info(self, base_dir):
         """Write the PKG-INFO file into the release tree.
         """
-        pkg_info = open(os.path.join(base_dir, 'PKG-INFO'), 'w')
-        try:
+        with open(os.path.join(base_dir, 'PKG-INFO'), 'w',
+                  encoding='UTF-8') as pkg_info:
             self.write_pkg_file(pkg_info)
-        finally:
-            pkg_info.close()
 
     def write_pkg_file(self, file):
         """Write the PKG-INFO format data to a file object.
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index e0efb877876..401e0225d5f 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -25,6 +25,9 @@ Core and Builtins
 Library
 -------
 
+- Issue #9561: distutils now reads and writes egg-info files using UTF-8,
+  instead of the locale encoding.
+
 - Issue #12888: Fix a bug in HTMLParser.unescape that prevented it to escape
   more than 128 entities.  Patch by Peter Otten.
 
@@ -72,7 +75,7 @@ Core and Builtins
 
 Library
 -------
- 
+
 - Issue #8286: The distutils command sdist will print a warning message instead
   of crashing when an invalid path is given in the manifest template.