Pico Iyer is a highly regarded name in the travel sphere. At 62, his books have been translated into more than 20 languages, he's written about various subjects ranging from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism, and he has delivered four TED talks. Recently, the British born author launched his book This Could Be Home, and became Raffles Hotel's first Writer-in-Residency.
Congrats on your new book, Pico. Tell us about This Could Be Home. When was the idea for the book conceptualised, and what sparked the inspiration?
In January 2017, I was first invited to come to Raffles to stay for four weeks and to write a short book. My calendar was full until August of that year, and by that time much of the hotel was closed for its refreshing.
So we decided that I’d write the book first – after spending two weeks in September 2018 wandering around the construction site out of which the new hotel was emerging and speaking to many in the Raffles team. I'd then come and enjoy my residency after the book was out, just in time for the reopening and the Singapore Bicentennial.
Instead of just writing about my adventures while staying in Raffles, I ended up plunging deep into its history and travelling along some more imaginative roads while catching the first glimpses of the new establishment that was coming to life. The book that I originally expected to be 10,000 words long ended up more than twice as long as anticipated.
How do you feel about being the first Writer-in-Residence at the Writers Bar?
I was amazed and deeply honoured when the invitation to serve as the first Writer-in-Residence arrived two and a half years ago. I spent eight years of my life studying nothing but literature; so I grew up on Maugham, Kipling, Neruda, Hesse and Hemingway. They were the heroes of my youth.
I could never have guessed, as a wide-eyed kid of 27, stepping into Raffles on a two-week escape from my journalist’s job in midtown Manhattan, that one day I’d be invited to play a small part in extending the tradition of the writers who had formed me.
When did you first come to Singapore?
I first came to Singapore in March 1984, and my very first stop was Raffles, where I came to stay for the night. I was back in Singapore the following year. That's when I brought my wife-to-be on her first trip outside East Asia, in September 1988. Similarly, her first stop, was at Raffles, where she was spellbound by the huge rooms, the evocative gardens and billiards tables, the memories of the England and even India of which she had long dreamed.
What was your first impression of Singapore, and how has it changed now?
As you know, Singapore has changed dramatically in the past 35 years, more so than any place I know except China. Every time I return – I’ve visited at least 20 times already and was here three times last year – I see much that I can barely recognise and feel that Singapore is really a pace-car for the future, perhaps 20 years ahead of New York City or Los Angeles.
As I write in my book, nowhere has raised its hipness quotient as dramatically in recent years as Singapore. Twenty years ago, I associated it with skyscrapers and bottom lines; though its skyline and per capita income are more impressive every time I visit, what strikes me now is its sense of style, it’s cool, its fashion-forward gestures, the creative agencies among the shophouses, the inventiveness and freshness of its designs.
What’s your favourite place in Singapore?
I love just walking anywhere in Singapore, since every block throws up some new combination of old and new, east and west, high and low. Singapore has taken pieces of many places and turned them into a combination that is entirely Singaporean and greater than the sum of its parts.
Apart from Raffles, Kinokuniya and BooksActually, the places I love to haunt are the same that transfix every tourist: the restaurants along Purvis Street, the Botanic Gardens, the boat ride at dusk from Clarke Quay, the hawker centres everywhere, the old churches.
Your job is a dream. What’s a common misconception about being a travel writer?
My job is almost entirely about writing, not travel. Many people we know can have fascinating adventures in Timbuktu but will put us to sleep when recounting them; conversely, a Philip Roth can describe gritty and uninviting Newark, New Jersey and hold us spellbound.
The travels I take for my job feel quite gruelling: I have to be on the move all day, every day, and take many, many pages of notes on every last encounter, emotion, sight and detail. And then the job really begins when I return home to my desk and have to work many hours a day for weeks on end turning my jumble of impressions into a single, clear narrative that will, I hope, hold the reader and sing.
As with any job, one tries to make it look easy and fun. But in the process of doing it, it couldn’t be more difficult. One occupational hazard of writing about place is that you can never take a holiday (except if you stay at home)!
Who are your literary heroes and how have they inspired your writing?
As a boy, the writer who most influenced me was the great 20th-century portraitist of places, Jan Morris, who taught me how to wander around and read cities, and who wrote prophetically, decades ago, about Singapore, and its offering of a fresh kind of future. I have always related intensely to the divided moral dramas of John le Carré the brilliant English novelist who, in his recent memoir, alludes, of course, to Raffles.
And the writer who has touched me for forty years or more, and the only writer around whom I’ve spent years creating an anthology, is the writer who also happens to be the one most closely associated with the Palm Court, where I was recently staying, Somerset Maugham. No writer has caught the slow dance of fascination between East and West, the subject of much of my writing (because that dance plays out inside myself), and no one has so captured the longing to escape and be loose among the unknown, as that very English runaway from England, Maugham.
This Could Be Home: Raffles Hotel and the City of Tomorrow is retailing at Epigram Books ($18.90) and Kinokuniya ($20.22)
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