William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple established himself as a multi-award-winning historian and writer with his debut book, ‘In Xanadu’ (1989), earning him the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award in 1990. Following this, his extensive research in Delhi for five years culminated in ‘City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi’ (1994), which garnered the prestigious Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1995, he authored ‘From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium’ (1997), an Autumn Book Award recipient, and wrote and presented Channel 4’s ‘Stones of the Raj’ that same year. Dalrymple’s profound exploration of Indian history continued with ‘White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India’ (2002), which received the Wolfson Prize for History in 2001 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize in 2003.

Dalrymple’s impact was recognized with the President’s Medal of the British Academy in 2018 and the Minerva Medal in 2022. He co-created the podcast ‘Empire’ (2022), which quickly topped UK Apple Podcast charts. For his extensive contributions to literature and the arts, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2023. Most recently, Dalrymple served as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2024 and published his latest work, ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World’, that same year.