Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer

(OD 1970)
Essayist and Novelist

Essayist and novelist Pico Iyer (OD 1970) won a King’s Scholarship to Eton, following his time at the Dragon, and then a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a Congratulatory Double First, with the highest marks of any English Literature student in the university.

After receiving a second master’s degree — and teaching — at Harvard, he began writing on world affairs for Time magazine and then, in 1987, moved to Kyoto, Japan, near which he still lives. By now he’s written 15 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. He’s also been writing up to 100 articles a year for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His four TED talks have received more than 10 million views so far. In one of Pico’s recent articles for The Guardian, Pico recounts how he ended up in Japan.

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