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© Hartwig Klappert
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Pico Iyer
UK
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Pico Iyer was born to Indian parents in Oxford, England in 1957 and grew up in England and California. After leaving school, he embarked on his first long journey which took him from California to Brazil and back again. Upon returning he studied English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and graduated with the highest honours. Back in the United States, he began graduate studies in Literature at Harvard University and worked for a travel guide series during the vacations, which involved visiting dozens of places in Greece, Italy and France in almost as many days. After receiving a second Master's Degree, he taught at Harvard for two years and then was hired by »Time Magazine« to write on world affairs, and later on books and cultural affairs. He has been writing essays, reportages, cover stories and reviews for numerous international newspapers – among them »The New York Review of Books«, »The Times Literary Supplement«, »Lettre International« and »National Geographic« – for many years.
The eight books Iyer has published to date can be assigned to the genre »travel literature«. They combine the experiences of a globetrotter, journalistic meticulousness and encyclopaedic knowledge with a fine sense of humor, sensitivity to the foreign and a profound search for something more. His first book, »Video Night in Kathmandu« (1988) describes, in a series of pieces on ten different Asian countries, the often bizarre effects of Western influences on the Far East. Despite a quiet melancholy arising from the new homelessness, »The Global Soul« (2000) offers an astonishing and amusing view of the globalisation of East and West, as the author beholds how cultures can fuse without completely losing their identities. With great lucidity and readability Iyer shows us the complexity of foreign horizons, and in so doing associates them with his own horizon in witty and abundant fashion. »Since I spend much of my life in a Catholic temple in California, a nondescript suburb in rural Japan and in between, in Tibet and Yemen and Easter Island, I try to bring the perspectives of those places (obliquely) into a New York-based magazine that might otherwise draw its wisdom from Wall Street and Washington.«
In »The Lady and the Monk« (1991) as well as the two novels »Cuba and the Night« (1995) and »Abandon« (2003) Iyer describes how larger cultural romances play out on an intimate scale when individuals fall in love. The new novel tells the story of a reticent Englishman who is in California doing research on the Sufi poet Rumi, when he takes to looking for a missing manuscript while trying to see how it relates to an alluring but elusive woman. Here too the fascination of the Other and the dangers and gains of fusing different horizons form Iyer's central theme.
The author has twice been a Fellow at the World Economic Forum in Davos and in 1995 the magazine »Utne Reader« listed him, along with Noam Chomsky and Vaclav Havel, among one hundred individuals worldwide whose vision is strong enough to change our lives. Iyer lives mostly in California and Japan.
© internationales literaturfestival berlin
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
The Lady and the Monk
Black Swan
London, 1992
Falling Off the Map
Black Swan
London, 1994
Cuba and the Night
Quartet
London, 1995
Tropical Classical
Vintage
New York, 1998
Video Night in Kathmandu
Bloomsbury
London, 2001
Sushi in Bombay, Jetlag in L.A.
Fischer
Frankfurt/Main, 2002
[T: Carl Freytag]
Abandon
Knopf
New York, 2003
Sun After Dark
Bloomsbury
London, 2005 |
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