Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, in 1957, grew up between England and California and currently lives in Japan. He is the author of ten books: his first, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), has appeared on many lists of the top travel-books of all time, and his second, The Lady and the Monk (1991), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in the category of Current Interest. His first novel, Cuba and the Night (1995), was optioned six times and then bought by Hollywood, and his book The Global Soul (2000), has inspired multi-media shows, conferences and movies around the world. In addition, he has written a film-script for Miramax, initiated a lecture series at the University of Toronto, starred in a commercial on CNN and been a Fellow more than once of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Since 1982 he has also written for more than 150 magazines and newspapers around the world, from The New York Times to National Geographic. He publishes up to 100 articles a year in all, including regular cover-stories on literature in The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper’s and on world affairs for Time. He has contributed introductions to more than forty books and seen his fiction and non-fiction translated into languages from Russian to Mandarin and Portuguese to Slovenian. His 2008 work of non-fiction, The Open Road, covering 34 years of conversations and travels with the XIVth Dalai Lama, was published in a dozen countries and was a best-seller across the U.S.

His latest book, The Man Within My Head, came out to widespread acclaim in early 2012.

Golo Mann Lecture Archives