Early life
Iyer was born Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer in Oxford, England, the son of Indian parents. His father was Raghavan N. Iyer, a philosopher and political theorist then enrolled in doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. [1] [7] His mother was the religious scholar and teacher Nandini Nanak Mehta. [1] He is the great-great-grandson of Indian Gujarati writer Mahipatram Nilkanth. [8] [9] Both of his parents grew up in India then went to England for tertiary education at Oxford, his father as India’s lone Rhodes Scholar in 1950 [10] [11] His name is a combination of the Buddha's name, Siddhartha and that of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, author of On The Dignity of Man. [12]
When Iyer was seven, in 1964, his family moved to California, when his father started working with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a California-based think tank, and started teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara. [11] [13] [14] For over a decade, Iyer moved between schools and college in England and his parents' home in California. [12]
He was a King's Scholar at Eton College, and won a Demyship [15] Magdalen College, Oxford]] and was awarded a congratulatory double first in English literature in 1978, with the highest marks of any student of English Literature. He then received an A.M. in literature from Harvard University in 1980,to go with the [Oxford MA] he was awarded in 1982.
Career
Iyer taught writing and literature at Harvard before joining Time in 1982 as a writer on world affairs. Since then, he has travelled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, while writing works of non-fiction and two novels, including Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), The Lady and the Monk (1991), The Global Soul (2000) and The Man Within My Head (2012). He is also a frequent speaker at literary festivals and universities around the world. He delivered popular TED talks in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2019 [see ted.com] and has twice been a Fellow at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
In 2019, he served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, Guest Director of the Telluride Film Festival. [16] [17] He was also the first writer-in-residence at Raffles Hotel Singapore, where he released his book, This Could be Home (2019), which explores Singapore's heritage through its landmarks. [18]
His 2023 book, The Half Known Life, was a national best-seller, [19] like his earlier works The Open Road [20] and The Art of Stillness. [21] It was also named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, [22] The New Yorker, [23] Time, [24] NPR and many other news-sources. In addition, it won a Lowell Thomas Gold Medal as Best Travel Book of the Year. [25]
Writing themes
Iyer’s writings began by observing the accelerating criss-crossing of cultures in Asia and across the world, and then, in his 2000 book, The Global Soul, he took that examination within, to explore the quickly increasing number of people world-wide who have many homes and a far wider, and sometimes less visible, sense of belonging than in times past. In a sequel to The Global Soul, The Open Road, he wrote about the XIVth Dalai Lama as an arresting example of one who had found home everywhere in a constantly moving world and reminded all of us that where you stand is more important than where you live.
His subsequent books have been more and more about the inner landscape—how to find faith in a world that often mocks it—and, as he writes in The Half Known Life, how to blend the realism we all need with the hope we can’t live without. Writing often on Leonard Cohen, Thomas Merton, Emily Dickinson and Graham Greene, he has moved beyond the surface, external descriptions of our shifting global world to a deeper enquiry into how we can live.
He has written numerous pieces on world affairs for Time , including cover stories, and the "Woman of the Year" story on Corazon Aquino in 1986. [26] [27] He has written 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 , contributing up to a hundred articles a year to various publications. [28] He has contributed liner-notes for four Leonard Cohen albums. His books have appeared in 23 languages so far, including Turkish, Russian, and Indonesian. He has also written introductions to more than 70 books, including works by R. K. Narayan, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Michael Ondaatje, Peter Matthiessen, and Isamu Noguchi. [29]
He has appeared seven times in the annual Best Spiritual Writing anthology, [30] and three times in the annual Best American Travel Writing anthology, [31] and has served as guest editor for both. [32] He has also appeared in the Best American Essays anthology. [33]
The Utne Reader named him in 1995 as one of 100 Visionaries worldwide who could change your life, [34] while the New Yorker observed that "As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed." [35]
Personal life
Iyer has been based since 1992 in Nara, Japan, [36] where he lives with his Japanese wife, Hiroko Takeuchi, [2] [37] and her two children from an earlier marriage. His book, The Lady and the Monk (1991), was a memoir and a reflection of his first year staying in Japan and his first meetings, in 1987, with Takeuchi. [38] His family home in Santa Barbara, California burned down due to a wildfire in 1990. Reflecting on this event, in his words, "For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil, than you could say, with a piece of soul." He splits his time between Japan and California. Asked if he feels rooted and accepted as a foreigner (regarding his current life in Japan) Iyer notes:
"Japan is therefore an ideal place because I never will be a true citizen here, and will always be an outsider, however long I live here and however well I speak the language. And the society around me is as comfortable with that as I am... I am not rooted in a place, I think, so much as in certain values and affiliations and friendships that I carry everywhere I go; my home is both invisible and portable. But I would gladly stay in this physical location for the rest of my life, and there is nothing in life that I want that it doesn't have." [39]
Iyer has known the 14th Dalai Lama since he was in his late teens, when he accompanied his father to Dharamshala, India, in 1974. In discussions about his spirituality, Iyer has mentioned not having a formal meditation practice, but practicing regular solitude, visiting a remote hermitage near Big Sur one hundred times since 1991 [40] [41]
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