The Half Known Life : In Search of Paradise

Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer (born 11 February 1957), known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born essayist and novelist known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. He has been a contributor to Time, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. Iyer's writings build on his growing up in a combination of English, American, and Indian cultures. Travel is a key theme in most of his works. In one of his works, The Global Soul (2000) he takes on the international airport as a central subject, along with associated jet lag, displacement and cultural mingling. As a travel writer, he often writes of living between the cracks and outside fixed categories. Many of his books have been about trying to see from within some society or way of life, but from an outsider's perspective. He has filed stories from Bhutan, Nepal, Ethiopia, Cuba, Argentina, Japan, and North Korea Some of the topics that he explores in his works include revolution in Cuba, Sufism, Buddhist Kyoto, and global disorientation. In his own words from a 1993 article in Harper's, "I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school; I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag." His writing alternating between the monastery and the airport, the Indian writer Pradeep Sebastian writes about Iyer, as "Thomas Merton on a frequent flier pass aiming to bring new global energies and possibilities into non-fiction"