Born in England, to parents from India, Pico Iyer was educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, while officially growing up in Southern California. He is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu (cited on many lists of the best travel books ever) and The Lady and the Monk (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, category Current Interest). For a quarter of a century, he has been an essayist for Time magazine, while also writing on literature for The New York Review of Books, on globalism for Harper's, and on many other topics for venues from The New York Times to National Geographic. The Open Road (2008), describing more than 30 years of talking and traveling with the fourteenth Dalai Lama, was a U.S. best seller. At Wellesley, Pico will read from his newly released book, The Man Within My Head (Knopf, January 2012).
