Outside magazine in 2012 called Pico Iyer "arguably the world's greatest living travel writer"; he is the author, most recently, of a New York Times best-selling book for TED called "The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere" (Simon & Schuster/TED). The author of more than 10 other books of fiction and nonfiction on subjects as varied as globalism, revolutionary Cuba, mystical Islam and the 14th Dalai Lama (whom he has known since 1974), Iyer has long written up to 100 articles a year for major media outlets from The New York Times and Vanity Fair to National Geographic, the New York Review of Books and Wired.

He has been a Fellow (more than once) of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is the rare speaker to have given talks for TED in two consecutive years (seen by more than 4 million people in all) and has written a film-script for Miramax and liner notes for Leonard Cohen. Born in Oxford, England, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, since 1987 Iyer has been based, when not traveling everywhere from North Korea to Easter Island, in a two-room apartment in rural Japan. Iyer's website is www.picoiyerjourneys.com.