REMAINING OURSELVES IN THE GLOBAL CITY

How is the nature of home changing around us—and inside us—as more and more of us have parts of ourselves in many cultures? What does it mean to live in a global neighbourhood, in which we can access many more places than we understand, and can feel very close to cultures that remain very far? And how we can be part of a planetary network without losing what is unique in us, and local? Drawing on 46 years of constant travel everywhere from North Korea to Easter Island, and 36 years of returning again and again to Singapore, Pico Iyer will look at the fresh possibilities of our many-homed world and the distances that remain.

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. He is the author of 15 books, translated into 23 languages, and has been a constant contributor to Time, The New York Times, the Financial Times and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide for more than 30 years. In 2019 he was Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, Guest Director of the Telluride Film Festival and the first official writer-in-residence at Raffles Singapore. His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far.