Bio

Pico Iyer is the author of 16 books of fiction and non-fiction, translated into 23 languages. Since 1986, he has been a constant essayist for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times and more than 250 periodicals world-wide. He has also written a screenplay for Miramax, many liner-notes for Leonard Cohen and the introductions to more than 70 other books.
On-screen, his four talks for TED have received more than 11 million views so far. He has been interviewed by everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Larry King, and, as host of his own onstage conversation series, “Speaking with Pico,” has led discussions with figures ranging from Martin Scorsese to Zadie Smith and Werner Herzog to Annie Leibovitz. His best-selling books cover topics as varied as the Cuban Revolution, Islamic mysticism, globalism, stillness and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with whom he has regularly been talking and traveling for 48 years.
Born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, he was educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, and at Oxford received a Congratulatory Double First, with the highest marks of any English Literature student in his year.
Most recently, in the summer of 2019 he served as Ferris Professor at Princeton, Guest Director of the Telluride Film Festival and the first official writer-in-residence at Raffles Hotel Singapore.
His next book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise comes out from Penguin India in January 2023.