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Pico Iyer (born 1957) is a British-born essayist and novelist. Iyer was born in Oxford, England, the son of the philosopher and theosophist Raghavan N. Iyer. When he was seven, 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 of any student in the university, [ citation needed ] and teaching 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 rural Japan, where he lives with his Japanese partner Hiroko, the "Lady" of his second book, and her two children. Having grown up a part of - and apart from - English, American and Indian cultures, he became the first so-called "travel writer" to take the international airport itself as his subject, and then jet lag, displacement and cultural minglings, and 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 some society or way of life - revolutionary Cuba, Sufism, Buddhist Kyoto, even global disorientation - from within, but with 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." In between his books, Iyer writes up to a hundred articles a year for magazines on several continents. 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 and many others. He also contributes regular columns to magazines in Italy, Austria and Hong Kong. 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 - and aims, perhaps, to bring new global energies and possibilities into non-fiction a little as Salman Rushdie has done with fiction. The Utne Reader named him in 1995 as one of 100 Visionaries worldwide who could change your life, while the New Yorker observed that "As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed." Asked if he finally 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.”
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