Pico Iyer Biography and latest books by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer (born 1957) is a British-born essayist and novelist. He is the author of numerous books on travel including Video Night in Kathmandu. His shorter pieces have appeared in Time, Harper\'s, NYRB and many other reputed publications.

Pico Iyer is one of the most revered and respected travel writers today. He was born in England, grew up in California, and studied at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. His essays, reviews, and other writings have appeared in Time, Conde Nast Traveler, Harper\'s, the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and Salon.com. His books, include Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Cuba and the Night, Falling off the Map, Tropical Classical, and The Global Soul. They have been translated into several languages and published in Europe, Asia, South America, and North America.

Life and career
Iyer is the son of Raghavan N. Iyer, an Oxford philosopher and Theosophist, and the religious scholar Nandini Nanak Mehta. When he was seven, his family moved to California, and for more than a decade he moved back and forth several times a year between schools and college in England and his parents\' home in California. He won academic scholarships to Eton, Oxford University and Harvard — graduating with a Congratulatory Double First at Oxford— and taught writing and literature at Harvard before joining Time in 1982 as a writer on world affairs. Since then he has traveled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, while writing seven works of non-fiction and two novels. He lives in Japan with his Japanese partner Hiroko Takeuchi, the "Lady" of his third book, and her two children.

In Pico Iyer’s words: The rewards of being a traveler are many - the memories, the freedom, the new friends, the expansion of horizon, the constant refining and undermining of assumptions. Travel writing has taught me, I think, to look more closely at a place than I would otherwise, to listen more attentively to what\'s going on around me and to think more deeply about it, before I leave and after I return.
Best of all, it\'s helped me see all of life as a travel, and as an occasion for writing (in order to make sense of it). A few years ago my house burned down, and I lost everything I owned; all my notes, all the books I hadn\'t yet completed, all my photos and hopes and letters. And yet traveling helped me see this as a liberation: to live more at home as if I were on the road, to savor the freedom from a past and from possessions, and to think back on all the people I had met, in Tibet and Morocco and Bolivia, who would still have thought of my life as luxurious. Most of the people one meets while traveling deal with more traumas every day than the privileged among us meet in a lifetime. That\'s how traveling humbles and inspires.”