Pico Iyer (b.1957,) fully Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer, is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin, best known for his travel and cross-cultural writing.
Iyer was born in Oxford, England, to parents who were academics and scholars. He attended Oxford’s Eton College and then received his second master’s in literature at Harvard, where he wrote for a budget travel guidebook during the summers. He taught writing and literature at Harvard before joining Time in 1982 as a writer on world affairs.
Iyer has traveled widely and written ten works of non-fiction and two novels, including Video Night in Kathmandu (1988,) The Lady and the Monk (1991,) The Global Soul (2000,) The Man Within My Head (2012,) and The Art of Stillness (2014.) Iyer’s essays frequently appear in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications worldwide. Iyer’s The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008) is an intimate portrait of the Dalai Lama.
Since 1992, Pico Iyer lives a simple near Nara, Japan, with his Japanese wife, Hiroko Takeuchi, and her two children from an earlier marriage. He spends part of each year among the Benedictine monks near the little town of Lucia in California’s Big Sur. He once said of the monastic way of life in the New Camaldoli Hermitage, “I’ve never discovered a place as transforming and as radiant.”
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American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.
—Pico Iyer
Luxury is a matter not of all the things you have, but all the things you can afford to do without.
—Pico Iyer
Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.
—Pico Iyer
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
—Pico Iyer
In an age of speed, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing could feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.
—Pico Iyer
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