Conversations on Compassion with James Doty, MD and Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is the author of ten books, including such long-running bestsellers on the travel shelves as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul. A writer for Time since 1982 and a prolific journalist, he is known for his adventures everywhere “North Korea to Easter Island, Ethiopia to Paraguay” while also writing novels about Revolutionary Cuba and mystical Islam. His first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, is featured on many best travel book lists; his first novel, Cuba and the Night, was bought by Hollywood; and his first work of the new millennium, The Global Soul, has inspired websites, multi media shows, and conferences around the world. The Man Within My Head (Knopf, 2012) A quirky hybrid story, not quite fiction, not quite non-fiction, retracing Iyer’s lifelong fascination with the late British novelist Graham Greene, and, through his interest in Greene, excavating pieces of Iyer’s own past, from his boyhood commute between his parents’ home in 60s California and his 15th century boarding-schools in England to his recent adventures everywhere from Mexico to Bhutan.

Born in England to parents from India and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard, Iyer writes frequently on globalism for Harper’s, on culture and politics for The New York Times, on literature for The New York Review of Books, and on many topics for magazines from National Geographic to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. He has written introductions to more than forty books (by Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Peter Matthiessen, Michael Ondaatje, and others), and liner notes for four Leonard Cohen albums. His 2008 book,The Open Road, drawing on thirty-four years of talks and travels with the fourteenth Dalai Lama, was a bestseller across the United States, and was published in a dozen countries.

An engaging and energetic speaker, Iyer has appeared twice as a Fellow at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland and spoken at campuses around the United States (including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and West Point) and speaks regularly at lecture series from Seattle Arts & Lectures to the 92nd Street Y. He has likewise charmed audiences at literary festivals from Bogota to Shanghai and Edinburgh to Vancouver. While undertaking fifteen book tours since 1991, he also appears frequently as an interviewer, for organizations from the Lannan Foundation to the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, leading onstage discussions with Martin Scorsese, Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, Werner Herzog, The Dalai Lama, President Mary Robinson and many others. He initiated the Hart House Lecture Series at the University of Toronto and appears frequently at venues such as the New York Public Library and the Asia Society.