Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford in 1957 to Indian parents, grew up in California (his parents moved to teach at Berkeley), was sent to Eton for school, and has spent much of his adult life in rural Japan while writing for American and British publications. He is the definitive citizen of nowhere, and this is not a complaint but a subject.

Video Night in Kathmandu (1988) was his first book — essays about Asian cultures in the act of being transformed by Western pop culture. He found McDonald's in Beijing, rock music in Bali, Wall Street in Bangkok, and described what these collisions produced with sympathy for all parties.

The Lady and the Monk (1991) is his Japan book — a year in Kyoto, learning to be still in a culture that values stillness more than the author's background had prepared him for. The Global Soul (2000) examines the experience of people who, like Iyer himself, belong to several cultures simultaneously and feel entirely at home in none.

The Art of Stillness (2014) marked a turn away from movement — he writes about his life in the Japanese countryside as a practised act of choosing to stay put, which in his case is as exotic as other people's travel.

His essays for Time magazine — written from Tokyo, Bhutan, Tibet, Cuba, North Korea — have brought travel writing into the context of contemporary global events with more depth than most.