Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is one of the most revered and respected travel writers alive today. An essayist for Time since 1986, he has travelled to over 170 countries and is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s and more than 200 other newspapers and magazines worldwide. He is the author of two novels and thirteen works of non-fiction on subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, from Graham Greene to Canadian visions of diversity, from forgotten nations to the 21st century global order and has published introductions to 70 other works.

His books have been translated into 23 languages and both his 2008 meditation on the XIVth Dalai Lama, The Open Road, and his TED Book, The Art of Stillness, were best-sellers across the U.S.. They have also made him a Guggenheim Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Between 2012 and 2016, Pico Iyer delivered three talks for TED, and between them they have received more than 7 million views. He has also written many liner-notes for Leonard Cohen, the first Hart House Lecture in Toronto and a screenplay for Miramax. In recent years he has been featured in program-length interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Krista Tippett, NHK World and many others, and he was once a face of Incredible India in its CNN television campaign.

Born in Oxford, England, in 1957, to parents (Gujurati and Tamil respectively) from Mumbai, he was educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. In 2019 he served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton.