Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
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Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer (born 1957) is a British-born essayist and author.

Iyer was born in Oxford England to Indian parents, who were both teachers of philosophy. 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, winning a Congratulatory Double First at Oxford and teaching writing and literature at Harvard before joining Time magazine 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 six works of non-fiction and two novels, and basing himself in rural Japan, where he lives with his Japanese partner Hiroko, the "Lady" of his second book, and her two children.

Having grown up a part of - and apart from - English, American and Indian cultures, he became the first so-called "travel writer" to take the international airport itself as his subject, and then jet lag, displacement and cultural minglings, and he writes often of his delight in living between the cracks and outside fixed categories. Most of his books have been about trying to see some society or way of life - Revolutionary Cuba, Sufism, Buddhist Kyoto, even global disorientation - from within, but with the larger perspesctive an outsider can sometimes bring. "I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility," he once wrote in Harper's, "living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly mongrel. I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school; I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag."

In between his books, Iyer writes up to a hundred articles a year for magazines on several continents. A regular essayist for Time magazine since 1986, he writes on literature for The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper's, on travel for The Financial Times, and on many other themes for The New York Times, National Geographic, The Times Literary Supplement and many others. He also contributes regular columns to magazines in Italy, Austria and Hong Kong. His books have appeared in languages such as Turkish, Russian, Bahasa Indonesian, his novels have been bought by Hollywood and he writes regularly on sport, film and religion, and especially on the places where mysticism and globalism converge.

Iyer's writing goes back and forth between the monastery and the airport - "Thomas Merton on a frequent flier pass," as the Indian writer Pradeep Sebastian has written - and aims, perhaps, to bring new global energies and possibilities into non-fiction a little as Salman Rushdie has done with fiction. The Utne Reader' named him in 1995 as one of 100 Visionaries worldwide who could change your life, while the New Yorker observed that "As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed."

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