Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is a British born journalist and noted author of numerous books.

Born in England to Indian parents, Iyer emmigrated to California in his childhood. Returning to England in his teenage years, he graduated from Eton College and Oxford University, and went on to pursue an extraordinary international career across the globe. He has worked north of the Arctic circle in Norway, has spent time in little known countries like Bhutan, and has much of the last twenty years in Japan.

Describing himself as "a global village on two legs," Pico Iyer considers himself a citizen of the world. "I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility," he says, "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."

Pico Iyer has long worked as a freelance journalist, and has contributed to an impressive number of prestigious publications, including Time Magazine. In a Time article in the leadup to the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Iyer's exhaustive study of South Korea helped lift the veil on the quiet transformation of what many people remembered as an impoverished third-world country into the world's eleventh largest economy. That article not only showed a very different face of Korea from the one most people thought they knew, but also helped solidify Iyer's already growing reputation as a writer and social historian.

Many Indians are proud of Iyer's achievements as an author, and have compared him to the renowned Indian writers Vikram Seth and Gita Mehta, but he prefers to see himself more as an international traveller than an Indian writer. The Utne Reader has lauded him for "elevating travel reportage to new heights," while the Los Angeles Times has called him "the rightful heir to Jan Morris, Paul Theroux, and company."