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Home > Authors > Festival Participant

Pico Iyer
Derek Shapton
Pico Iyer was born in England in 1957 to parents from India. He grew up in California and currently lives in Japan.

Iyer is the author of eight books. His first, Video Night in Kathmandu, has appeared on many lists of the top travel books of all time, and his second, The Lady and the Monk, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in the category of Current Interest. His first novel, Cuba and the Night, was optioned six times and then bought by Hollywood, and his book The Global Soul has inspired multimedia shows, conferences and web sites around the world.

In addition, he has written a film script for Miramax, initiated the Hart House Lecture series at the University of Toronto, helped name an internationally known soft drink, and been a Fellow of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Since 1980 he has also written up to a hundred articles a year for more than a hundred magazines and newspapers around the world, publishing regular cover stories on literature in The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper’s, and on films and music for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. He writes a regular column for magazines in both Italy and Austria, has contributed the introductions to 18 different books, as well as the liner notes to The Essential Leonard Cohen. His most recent novel, Abandon, was published in 2003 and has been translated into Russian, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesian, as well as many other languages.

In 1995 Iyer was named by the Utne Reader, along with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel, as one of 100 visionaries worldwide who “could change your life.”











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