I think that Pico Iyer is an excellent writer. One of his favourite topics is observing things as an outsider because of travelling and living in various countries.


"It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer, born to Indian parents in Oxford, England (1957). He went to graduate school at Harvard, and during the summers he got a job writing for a budget travel guidebook. He got a job working for Time magazine. His first book, Video Nights in Katmandu, came out in 1988.

Pico Iyer said, 'The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. And though reading is the best school of writing, school is the worst place for reading. Writing should ... be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent ... and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.' "

(from "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio in the U.S.)