Pico Iyer is a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, a longtime essayist for Time magazine, a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the author of 10 books and more than 40 introductions to other books. He writes up to 100 articles a year, for magazines from The New York Review of Books to Wired and Vanity Fair to Harper’s, and he’s also given talks for TED, been a Fellow, more than once, at the World Economic Forum, and written a film-script for Miramax. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and been sold to Hollywood.

A product of Eton, Oxford and Harvard, Iyer was born in Oxford, England to parents from India and grew up between school in England and holidays in his parents’ new home in California. At Eton he was a King’s Scholar and at Oxford he graduated with a Congratulatory Double First in English, and the highest marks of any student in the university.