Pico Iyer

Notorious for his love of Canada in general and Toronto in particular, Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. He is the author of two novels and eight works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul and, published early in 2012, a meditation on Graham Greene entitled The Man Within My Head. His previous book, The Open Road, describing 34 years of talks with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, came out in a dozen countries and was a best-seller across the U.S.

A constant contributor to The New York Review of Books, Harper’s and more than 150 other magazines across the globe, he initiated the Hart House Lecture at the University of Toronto in 2001, with a talk (and monograph) entitled Imagining Canada. He writes often on Michael Ondaatje, global culture and Leonard Cohen, from his longtime home in rural Japan.