William Dalrymple, FRSL FRAS (born 20 March 1965 in Scotland) is a multiple-award winning historian and travel writer, as well as a distinguished broadcaster, critic, art historian, foreign correspondent and co-director of Asia's largest literary festival.
Dalrymple was born William Hamilton-Dalrymple, the son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th baronet, a cousin of Virginia Woolf. He was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first a history exhibitioner and then senior history scholar.
Dalrymple, who has lived in Delhi on and off for the last 25 years, is married to the artist Olivia Fraser and has three children, Ibby, Sam, and Adam, and a cockatoo called Albinia. The South Asia correspondent of the New Statesman since 2004, he is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Literature.
Dalrymple's interests include India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Mughal rule, the Muslim world, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity. All of his seven books have won major literary prizes, as have his radio and television documentaries. His first three were travel books based on his journeys in the Middle East, India and Central Asia. His early influences included the travel writers such as Robert Byron, Eric Newby, and Bruce Chatwin. More recently, Dalrymple has published a book of essays about South Asia, and two award-winning histories of the interaction between the British and the Mughals between the eighteenth and mid nineteenth century. His books have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, Estonian, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Marathi and Bengali.
He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books , The Guardian , the New Statesman and The New Yorker . He has also written many articles for Time magazine, to which he contributed the article The Real Islam for their 2004 annual issue Asian Journey . He wrote an essay Business as Usualfor the India Charges Ahead special issue commemorating 60 years of Indian independence.
He attended the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008 - giving readings and taking workshops in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem.
He is the founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival along with the writer Namita Gokhale. The festival, now the largest literary festival in Asia and the largest free festival of literature in the world, is held annually in the Indian city of Jaipur and was recently dubbed "the greatest literary show on earth" by The Daily Beast.
Dalrymple spends most of the year at his farm house in Mehrauli near New Delhi, India, but summers in London and Edinburgh.
His latest book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, was published by Bloomsbury, and went to the number one slot on the Indian non-fiction section bestseller list. Since its publication he has been touring the UK, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, Holland and the US with a band consisting of some of the people featured in his book including Sufis, Fakirs, Bauls, Theveram hymn singers as well as a prison warder and part-time Theyyam dancer widely believed to be an incarnation of the God Vishnu.
He is now beginning work on a history of the First Afghan War 1839-42, and curating a major show of the late Mughal and Company School painting of Delhi for the Asia Society in New York, due to open January 2012.
Written at age 22 while Dalrymple undertook a journey from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem) to the site of Shangdu (Inner Mongolia, China), known as Xanadu in English literature.
City of Djinns (1994)
His second book covers a one year period of time that Dalrymple and his wife spent in Delhi. The book also incorporates much of Delhi's history, especially issues surrounding Partition and colonial rule of Delhi.
A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997)
His third book traces the Eastern Orthodox congregations scattered across the Middle East from their ancient origins, reviews how they have fared under centuries of Islamic rule, and discusses the complex relationship between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in the region.
The Age of Kali (1998)
This book is a collection of essays from a decade of travel around the Indian subcontinent. It deals with many controversial subjects such as Sati, the caste wars in India, political corruption, and terrorism. It was released in India as At the Court of the Fish-Eyed Goddess.
White Mughals (2002)
Dalrymple's fifth book is social history, covering the warm relations that existed between the British and some Indians in the 18th and early 19th century, when one of three British men in Hyderabad state in India was married to an Indian woman. It documents the interracial liaison between English officer James Achilles Kirkpatrick and an Indian princess. The geopolitical context of late 18th century India is also covered.
Begums, Thugs & White Mughals — The Journals of Fanny Parkes (2002)
Dalrymple edited this historical travel book based on the journals of Fanny Parkes, who resided in India from 1822 to 1846.
The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006)
Dalrymple details the circumstances in which Delhi was taken over by the sepoys during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the subsequent downfall of the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar.
in Search of the Sacred in Modern India. London, Bloomsbury. (2009) ISBN 978-1-4088-0061-4
This is a detailed account of the varied spiritual lives of nine people in a rapidly-changing India. The book explores how the lives of each of these people, each of whom represent a different religious path, have been affected by modern India's extraordinary growth and development
Dalrymple has written and presented the six part television series Stones of the Raj (Channel 4, August 1997) , the three part Indian Journeys (BBC, August 2002) and Sufi Soul (Channel 4, Nov 2005) .
The six part Stones of the Raj documents the stories behind some of British India's colonial architecture starting with Lahore (16 August 1997), Calcutta (23 August 1997), The French Connection (30 August 1997), The Fatal Friendship (6 September 1997), Surrey In Tibet (13 September 1997), and concluded with The Magnificent Ruin (20 September 1997).
The trilogy of Indian Journeys consists of three one hour episodes starting with Shiva’s Matted Locks which while tracing the source of the river Ganges, takes Dalrymple on a journey to the Himalayas. The second part City Of Djinns, is based on his travel book of the same name, takes a look at Delhi’s history, and last Doubting Thomas, which takes Dalrymple to the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where St Thomas, the Apostle of Jesus is closely associated .
Additionally he has done a six-part history series The Long Search for Radio 4 . In this series Dalrymple searches to discover the spiritual roots of the British Isles. As Dalrymple says "In the course of my travels I often came across the assumption that intense spirituality was somehow the preserve of what many call 'the mystic East'... it's a misconception that has always irritated me as I've always regarded our own indigenous British traditions of spirituality as especially rich."
In Xanadu - 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award; Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; shortlisted for John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.
City of Djinns - 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award.
From the Holy Mountain - Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997; shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize.
The Age of Kali - 1998, won the French Prix d'Astrolabe in 2005.
White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002) won the Wolfson Prize for History (2002) and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize (2003); also shortlisted for the Kiryama Prize, the PEN History Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.)
Awarded the Mungo Park Medal in 2002 by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his outstanding contribution to travel literature.
The television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which he wrote and presented, won him the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.
The Long Search, his BBC Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism, won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting and was described by the judges as "thrilling in its brilliance... near perfect radio."
In December 2005 his article on the madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the 2005 FPA Media Awards.
Received the Sykes Medal in 2005 from the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his contribution "to understanding contemporary Islam."
Received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of St Andrews (2006) "for his services to literature and international relations, to broadcasting and understanding."
On 20 February 2007 The Last Mughal won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for History and Biography.
Received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of Lucknow (2007) "for his outstanding contribution in literature and history."
Received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of Aberdeen (2008.
Received the 2008 Colonel James Tod Award given by the Maharana Mewar Foundation for achieving excellence in his field.
The Last Mughal won the 2007 Vodafone Crossword Book Award for best work in English non-fiction.
Nine Lives has received the 2010 Asia House Award for Asian Literature.
