2002 Presenter Full Presenter List

Pico Iyer

Travel Writer

He’s been called one of the most revered travel writers of our time and once described himself as “a global village on two legs”. An essayist who writes frequently for The New York Times Book Review and Harper’s, and who is a regular contributor to Salon, Conde Nast Traveller, Civilization (the magazine of the U.S. Library of Congress) and Time, Iyer was recently hailed by The Utne Reader as one of the 100 visionaries worldwide who “could change your life”.

Iyer’s globetrotting has produced six books, including Video Night in Katmandu and The Lady and the Monk. He has been a Fellow (twice) of the World Economic Forum in Davos, and inaugurated the Hart House Lecture series at the University of Toronto (Iyer once said that Toronto “…is small enough and malleable enough to be shaped into a workable international community…” and that it “…offers a very hopeful prospect of how the city of the future will come into being….”).

Iyer was born in Oxford, England, where he also studied. He went on to acquire a second Master’s degree at Harvard, where he taught literature and writing for two years.