Pico Iyer

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Pico Iyer
Born Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer[1]
1957 (age 55–56)
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 crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and many other publications.

Contents

Life and career [edit]

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] His unusual name is a combination of Budha's name- Sidhartha, an Italian Philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his caste Iyer. 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 eight works of non-fiction and two novels, and basing himself in Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife, 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]

In his essay on dreaming in the New York Review of Books (21 March 2013) he also comments (regarding Paris):

"I went there in life not long ago, to try to chase the connection down, but of course my search yielded nothing. Why, as I keep revisiting Paris in the night hours, do I very rarely see Santa Barbara, where I’ve been officially resident for almost fifty years? In my dreams, when it does appear, it’s simply a wilderness, a blank space in the hills next to which I stay, through which some cars are edging, tentative and lost."

Writings [edit]

Having grown up a part of — and apart from — English, American and Indian cultures, he became one of the first writers to take the international airport itself as his 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]

Video Night in Kathmandu And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East

Iyer has written numerous pieces on world affairs for Time, including 10 cover stories, and the "Woman of the Year" story on Corazon Aquino in 1986.[6][7] 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.[8] He has contributed liner-notes for four Leonard Cohen albums. His books have appeared in languages such as Turkish, Russian, and Indonesian, and he has written introductions to more than 40 books, including works by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Michael Ondaatje, Peter Matthiessen, and Isamu Noguchi.[9] He also writes regularly on sport, film, and religion — and especially on the places where mysticism and globalism converge. He is also well versed in Japanese culture, language and poetry, as is evident from his book "Lady and The Monk".

He has appeared seven times in the annual Best Spiritual Writing anthology,[10] and three times in the annual Best American Travel Writing anthology,[11] and has served as guest-editor for both.[12] He has also appeared in the Best American Essays anthology.[13]

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[14] — 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,[15] while the New Yorker observed that "As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed."[16]

Iyer's latest book is The Man WIthin My Head, which is a story of his own life, juxtaposed with that of the author Graham Greene.[17]

Bibliography [edit]

Books [edit]

Selected introductions [edit]

  • 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
  • Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha. (Peter Owen Publishers in London brought this out in August 2012)
  • Arto Paasilinna, The Year of the Hare
  • Frederick Prokosch, 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
  • Natsume Soseki, The Gate

Notes [edit]

  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. ^ List of articles in Time
  7. ^ Pico Iyer (1987-01-05). "Corazon Aquino". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2008-03-26. 
  8. ^ program for Dalai Lama appearance at New York Town Hall, May 2009
  9. ^ Full listing at picoiyerjourneys.com - about
  10. ^ volumes for 1999, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012
  11. ^ volumes for 2001, 2006, 2012
  12. ^ Best American Travel Writing 2004; Best Spiritual Writing 2010
  13. ^ 2011 edition
  14. ^ The Hindu, 7 November 2006.
  15. ^ Utne Reader, January/February 1995.
  16. ^ The New Yorker, May 1997 issue on Indian writing, "Briefly Noted".[page needed]
  17. ^ Hertzberg, Andrew; "The Greene Album: A Review of The Man Within My Head", Frontier Psychiatrist, 8 May 2012.

References [edit]

  • Iyer, Pico. The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008) Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-307-26760-3

External links [edit]

Writing
Interviews
Authority control
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