“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

—Pico Iyer

With his keen-eyed observations, bestselling writer Pico Iyer is a chronicler of the desire to seek new frontiers and view familiar terrain through fresh eyes. “Arguably the world’s greatest living travel writer,” according to Outside magazine, he is the author of two novels and over a dozen works of nonfiction, including such enduring favorites as The Lady and the Monk and The Art of Stillness. Iyer has been embraced by both spiritual seekers and startup entrepreneurs as a beacon of wisdom in a frenetic world. The Utne Reader included him alongside Noam Chomsky and Václav Havel as “one of 100 visionaries worldwide who could change your life.” His forthcoming memoir, The Messenger in White, is an intimate and bracing consideration of aging and parent-child relationships, inspired by the experience of caring for his mother at the end of her long life.

Iyer’s first book was completed while he was still working as a world affairs writer for Time. Video Night in Kathmandu chronicled his explorations across ten countries in Asia and the way these lands have been affected—or not—by the influence of Western culture. “A sensual feast of rich impressions,” according to the Los Angeles Times, Video Night in Kathmandu was praised for its refreshing wit, originality, and insight. In his subsequent travel writing, Iyer continues to meditate on the intensifying criss-crossings between East and West, past and present, projection and reality.

For five decades, Iyer has spent weeks at a time talking and traveling with the XIVth Dalai Lama: eating lunch with the Tibetan leader every day; attending all of his public engagements; and sitting in on his private audiences with old friends, religious leaders, political strategists, and scientists. It was that extraordinary intimacy that allowed Iyer to write the bestselling The Open Road, drawn from decades of talks and travels, which The New York Times Book Review called a “trenchant, impassioned look at a singular life.”

His most recent book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, is a revelatory exploration of the clarity and calm that can be found in quiet retreat. For over three decades, Iyer has made over one hundred retreats to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. While not a member of any religious group, he has found his life clarified and transformed by sitting in silence. Through many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant change and difficulty—from a house burning down, a parent dying, a daughter being diagnosed with cancer—Iyer chronicles wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inner stillness.

“The author brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose: at the monastery, ‘it’s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.’ This is stunning.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Iyer has given five popular TED Talks over the past decade, which together earned over twelve million views. They present new perspectives on longing and belonging, wisdom, and our place in the busy world. For many years he has hosted “Speaking with Pico,” a series of intimate, 90-minute public conversations in Santa Barbara, California with such visionaries as Philip Glass, Marina Abramovic, Zadie Smith and Isabella Rossellini. His talks have enthralled audiences at Google, Coca-Cola, Fox Broadcasting, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

His books have been translated into 23 languages, and he has written liner notes for Leonard Cohen, a film script for Miramax, a libretto for a chamber orchestra, and the introductions to more than one hundred other works. A regular essayist for more than forty years for Time, The New York Times, Harper’s, National Geographic, Condé Nast Traveler and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide, Iyer has reported extensively from more than 45 countries.

Iyer was born in Oxford, England to parents from India. He was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard, and earned master’s degrees from Oxford and Harvard, while being awarded two Honorary Doctorates in Humane Letters. His work has won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 1992, he has divided his time, with his wife, between Western Japan and California.

For more information on Pico Iyer, please visit picoiyerjourneys.com or picoiyer.com.