Eric Weiner

For as long as he can remember, Eric Weiner has been a restless soul. When he was five years old, he ran away from home, determined to find what wonders awaited around the corner. He says he’s been looking ever since.

Having always dreamed of being a foreign correspondent, he could hardly believe his good fortune when, one day in 1993, NPR dispatched him to India as the network’s first full-time correspondent in that country. He spent two years based in New Delhi, covering everything from an outbreak of bubonic plague to India’s economic reforms, before moving on to other postings in Jerusalem and Tokyo. Over the years, he reported from more than 30 countries, everywhere from Algeria to the Indonesia.

Typically, foreign correspondents travel to the world’s least happy countries (think Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) and seek out the least happy people there (refugees, war orphans). On one level, this is important, rewarding work. It can also, he says, be a real bummer. As a result, he decided to write a book in which he sought out the world’s unheralded happy places. Countries that, in their own way, are busy pursuing that most American of pursuits: happiness. The result was The Geography of Bliss, a New York Times Bestseller that has been translated into 18 languages.

In his latest book, Man Seeks God, Weiner continued searching, but this time for a taste of the divine. To this end, he traveled to Kathmandu and Istanbul—and even Vegas—where he experienced first-hand the varieties of religious experience.

His commentary and essays appear in the Los Angeles Times, Slate and The New Republic, among other publications, and he writes regularly for a new travel magazine called AFAR.

He has also served as a correspondent for NPR in New York, Miami and Washington, D.C. and was part of a team of NPR reporters that won a Peabody award for a series of investigative reports about the U.S. tobacco industry. He attended the University of Maryland and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2003. He’s also a former reporter for The New York Times.