Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Born Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer[1]
1957 (age 54–55)
Oxford, England
Occupation Essayist, novelist
Genres Non-fiction/fiction
Notable award(s) Guggenheim Fellowship, 2005
Relative(s) Raghavan N. Iyer (father, deceased); Nandini Iyer (mother); Hiroko Takeuchi (wife)

Pico Iyer (born 1957) is a British-born essayist and novelist. He is the author of numerous books on travel including Video Night in Kathmandu. His shorter pieces regularly appear in Time, Harper's, NYRB and many other publications.

Contents

[edit] Life and career

Iyer was born in Oxford, England, the son of Raghavan N. Iyer, an Oxford philosopher and Theosophist,[1][2] and the religious scholar Nandini Nanak Mehta.[1] When he was eight, his family moved to California, and for more than a decade he moved back and forth several times a year between schools and college in England and his parents' home in California. He won academic scholarships to Eton, Oxford University and Harvard — graduating with a Congratulatory Double First at Oxford, with the highest marks in the university [see official bio from Alfred A. Knopf publishers, or program for Dalai Lama appearance at New York Town Hall, May 2009]— and taught writing and literature at Harvard before joining Time in 1982 as a writer on world affairs. Since then he has traveled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, while writing seven works of non-fiction and two novels, and basing himself in Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife, divorcee Hiroko Takeuchi,[3] the "Lady" of his third book, and her two children from an earlier marriage.

Asked if he feels rooted and accepted as a foreigner (regarding his current life in Japan) Iyer replies:

“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.” [4]

Having grown up a part of — and apart from — English, American and Indian cultures, he became one of many writers who take the international airport itself as their subject, along with the associated jet lag, displacement and cultural minglings. He writes often of his delight in living between the cracks and outside fixed categories. Most of his books have been about trying to see from within some society or way of life — revolutionary Cuba, Sufism, Buddhist Kyoto, even global disorientation — but from the larger perspective an outsider can sometimes bring. "I am simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility," he wrote in 1993 in Harper's, "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."[5]

A regular essayist for Time since 1986, he writes 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, TLS contributing up to a hundred articles a year to various publications {see program for Dalai Lama appearance at New York Town Hall, May 2009}. He has contributed liner-notes for four Leonard Cohen albums. His books have appeared in languages such as Turkish, Russian, and Indonesian, and he writes regularly on sport, film and religion — and especially on the places where mysticism and globalism converge.

Iyer's writing goes back and forth between the monastery and the airport — "Thomas Merton on a frequent flier pass," as the Indian writer Pradeep Sebastian has written[6] — and aims, perhaps, to bring new global energies and possibilities into non-fiction. The Utne Reader named him in 1995 as one of 100 Visionaries worldwide who could change your life,[7] while the New Yorker observed that "As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed."[8]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

Selected introductions
  • Graham Greene, The Complete Stories
  • Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
  • Somerset Maugham, The Skeptical Romancer (editor/writer of introduction)
  • R.K. Narayan, A Tiger for Malgudi and The Man-Eater of Malgudi
  • Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
  • Arto Paasilinna, The Year of the Hare
  • Frederick Prokosh, The Asiatics
  • Donald Richie, The Inland Sea
  • Nicolas Rothwell, Wings of the Kite-Hawk
  • Huston Smith, Tales of Wonder
  • Lawrence Weschler, A Wanderer in the Perfect City

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c University of California: In Memoriam, Raghavan Iyer, 1995
  2. ^ Rukun Advani, "Mahatma for Sale", The Hindu, 27 April 2003
  3. ^ Iyer 2008, pg. 274
  4. ^ Brenner, Angie; "Global Writer, Heart & Soul - Interview with Pico Iyer", Wild River Review, November 19, 2007.
  5. ^ April 1993 issue of Harper's.
  6. ^ The Hindu, 7 November 2006.
  7. ^ Utne Reader, January/February 1995.
  8. ^ The New Yorker, May 1997 issue on Indian writing, "Briefly Noted".[page needed]

[edit] References

  • Iyer, Pico. The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008) Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0307267603

[edit] External links

Website http://picoiyerjourneys.com/

Writing
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