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] [3] His mother was the religious scholar and teacher Nandini Nanak Mehta. [1] He is the great-great-grandson of Indian Gujarati writer Mahipatram Nilkanth. [4] [5] Both of his parents grew up in India then went to England for tertiary education. [6] His name is a combination of the Buddha's name, Siddhartha and that of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola. [7]
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. [6] [8] [9] For over a decade, Iyer moved between schools and college in England and his parents' home in California. [7]
He was a King's Scholar at Eton College, and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and was awarded a congratulatory double first in English literature in 1978. He then received an A.M. in literature from Harvard University in 1980. He received the [Oxford MA] 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. [10] [11] 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. [12]
Writing themes
Iyer's writings build on his growing up in a combination of English, American, and Indian cultures. Travel is a key theme in most of his works. In one of his works, The Global Soul (2000) he takes on the international airport as a central subject, along with associated jet lag, displacement and cultural mingling. As a travel writer, he often writes of living between the cracks and outside fixed categories. Many of his books have been about trying to see from within some society or way of life, but from an outsider's perspective. He has filed stories from Bhutan, Nepal, Ethiopia, Cuba, Argentina, Japan, and North Korea [13] Some of the topics that he explores in his works include revolution in Cuba, Sufism, Buddhist Kyoto, and global disorientation. In his own words from a 1993 article in Harper's, "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." [14] His writing alternating between the monastery and the airport, the Indian writer Pradeep Sebastian writes about Iyer, as "Thomas Merton on a frequent flier pass aiming to bring new global energies and possibilities into non-fiction". [15]
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. [16] [17] 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. [18] 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. [19]
He has appeared seven times in the annual Best Spiritual Writing anthology, [20] and three times in the annual Best American Travel Writing anthology, [21] and has served as guest editor for both. [22] He has also appeared in the Best American Essays anthology. [23]
The Utne Reader named him in 1995 as one of 100 Visionaries worldwide who could change your life, [24] while the New Yorker observed that "As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed." [25]
Personal life
Iyer has been based since 1992 in Nara, Japan, [26] where he lives with his Japanese wife, Hiroko Takeuchi, [2] [27] and her two children from an earlier marriage. His book, The Lady and the Monk (1991), was a memoir and a reflection of his relationship with Takeuchi. [28] 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." [29]
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 several times a year. [30]
Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer.
James Mackenzie Fallows is an American writer and journalist. He is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others. He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for two years was the youngest person ever to hold that job.
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and university professor. He is best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.
Christopher James Paolini is an American author. He is best known for The Inheritance Cycle, which consists of the books Eragon (2002), Eldest (2005), Brisingr (2008), Inheritance (2011), and the follow-up short story collection The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm (2018). His first science fiction novel, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, was published on September 15, 2020. He lives in Paradise Valley, Montana, where he wrote his first book.
Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.
Philip Levine was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
Donald Richie was an American-born author who wrote about the Japanese people, the culture of Japan, and especially Japanese cinema. Although he considered himself primarily a film historian, Richie also directed a number of experimental films, the first when he was seventeen.
Randall Kenan was an American author. Born in Brooklyn, New York, at six weeks old Kenan moved to Duplin County, North Carolina, a small rural community, where he lived with his grandparents in a town named Wallace. Many of Kenan's novels are set around the area of his home in North Carolina. The focus of much of Kenan's work centers around what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. Some of Kenan's most notable works include the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992, A Visitation of Spirits, and The Fire This Time. Kenan was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize.
Raghavan Narasimhan Iyer was an Indian academic, political theorist and philosopher. Educated at Oxford, he was professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1965 to 1986, when he retired as professor emeritus. A founding member of the Santa Barbara branch of the United Lodge of Theosophists, he also co-founded the Institute of World Culture in Santa Barbara in 1976, and remained its president until 1986.
Jay Rubin is an American translator, writer, scholar and Japanologist. He is one of the main translators of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami into English. He has also written a guide to Japanese, Making Sense of Japanese, and a biographical literary analysis of Murakami.
Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.
Patrick Rollo Basil French was a British writer, historian and academician. He was the author of several books including: Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), a biography of Francis Younghusband; The World Is What It Is (2008), an authorised biography of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul that won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States of America; and India: A Portrait (2011).
Serge Schmemann is a French-born American writer and member of the editorial board of The New York Times who specializes in international affairs. He was editorial page editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, the erstwhile global edition of The New York Times, from 2003 until its dissolution in 2013. Earlier in his career, he worked for the Associated Press and was a bureau chief and editor for The New York Times.
The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, full spiritual name: Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, also known as Tenzin Gyatso; né Lhamo Thondup; is the incumbent Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader and head of Tibetan Buddhism. Before 1959, he served as both the resident spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, and subsequently established and led the Tibetan government in exile represented by the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, India. The adherents of Tibetan Buddhism consider the Dalai Lama a living Bodhisattva, specifically an emanation of Avalokiteśvara or Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, a belief central to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and the institution of the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama, whose name means Ocean of Wisdom, is known to Tibetans as Gyalwa Rinpoche, The Precious Jewel-like Buddha-Master, Kundun, The Presence, and Yizhin Norbu, The Wish-Fulfilling Gem. His devotees, as well as much of the Western world, often call him His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the style employed on his website. He is also the leader and a monk of the Gelug school, the newest school of Tibetan Buddhism, formally headed by the Ganden Tripa.
The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home is a 2001 collection of essays by Pico Iyer, reflecting on the increasingly globalized world and the ramifications that this has for him personally. The book belongs in the corpus of travel writing, though its series of chapters often offer a highly introspective view of the author's person-hood.
Victor Chan is a physicist and a Hong-Kong-born Canadian writer. Founder of the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education, Chan has known the 14th Dalai Lama since 1972. Co-author with him of two essays, he also wrote a guide of pilgrimage to Tibet. He lives in Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada.
Brooks Haxton is an American poet and translator. His publications include nine books of original poems and four books of translations from the German, the French, and ancient Greek. In 2014 he published Fading Hearts on the River, a book of nonfiction about his son's professional poker career.
The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama is a non-fiction book authored by Thomas Laird, an American journalist based out of Kathmandu, Nepal.
Raghavan Ramachandran Iyer was an Indian-born American chef and author. His series of cookbooks and guides to Indian cooking, beginning with Betty Crocker's Indian Home Cooking in 2001, introduced many Americans to the cuisine. He earned praise for accessibility and controversy for straying from tradition for his embrace of simplified ingredients such as curry powder.
