Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Since 1986, he has been an essayist for Time magazine. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1995, for which he has written on literature, global culture, religion, China, and Tibet. He is also a contributor to The New York Times, Harper&rdsq;s Magazine, the Financial Times, and National Geographic, among others.
Iyer is the author of ten books, including The Open Road (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), an examination of the XIVth Dalai Lama that draws upon thirty-four years of talks and travels; and The Man Within My Head (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), on Graham Greene, hauntedness, and fatherhood.
Iyer studied at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. He was born in Oxford, England to parents from India and grew up in England and California. For the past twenty years, he has been based in rural Japan.