"Insightful and profound." — Japan Times
Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England in 1957, to parents from Bombay, and went through the classic English assembly-line—the Dragon School, Eton, Oxford and Harvard. He won a King’s Scholarship to Eton and a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford where he was awarded a Congratulatory Double First with the highest marks of any English Literature student in the university.
Since 1982 he’s been a full-time writer and since 1987 he’s been based in Western Japan, writing up to 100 articles a year (for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and 250 periodicals worldwide) to support his family. His books cover everything from Islamic mysticism to the Cuban Revolution, globalism to stillness and Graham Greene to the XIVth Dalai Lama. He’s also written introductions to more than 100 other books, liner notes and program notes for Leonard Cohen and a screenplay for Miramax.
His five talks for TED have received more than 11 million views so far, and he’s been featured on program-length interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Krista Tippett and many others. In California his “Speaking with Pico” series of onstage conversations features intimate 75-minute chats with several visionaries each year, among them Philip Glass, Marina Abramovic, Isabella Rossellini, George Saunders and Zadie Smith.
When not in Japan, he’s often to be found in the New Camaldoli hermitage in Big Sur, California.