Pico Iyer.

Pico Iyer, born on February 11, 1957, in Oxford, is a British writer and essayist of Indian descent, specializing in travel writing and cultural exchange. He grew up in England and California and studied at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, before obtaining an A.M. in literature from Harvard.

Based in Asia since 1987, he has lived in the Japanese countryside since 1992 with his Japanese wife and two children. He has traveled the world and written about countries as diverse as Bhutan, Nepal, Cuba, Japan, and North Korea. His books, translated into more than twenty languages, explore travel, spirituality, and cultural encounters. His best-known titles include Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and The Paths of the Dalai Lama, the result of thirty years of observing the Dalai Lama.

Pico Iyer is a regular contributor to Time, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times, and speaks at conferences, literary festivals, and TED Talks around the world.

He is the author of Bhutan: Portrait of a Kingdom, published by Éditions du Pacifique.