William Dalrymple

Template:Short description Template:Other people Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox writer William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple (born 20 March 1965) is a Scottish historian, art historian, curator, broadcaster, critic and author.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Dalrymple's books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński, the Arthur Ross Medal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. He has been five times long-listed and once shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and was a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. The BBC television documentary on his pilgrimage to the source of the river Ganges, "Shiva's Matted Locks", one of three episodes of his Indian Journeys series, which Dalrymple wrote and presented, won him the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2012 he was appointed a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities by Princeton University.<ref>Short-Term Visiting Fellows Template:Webarchive, Princeton University. Retrieved 1 October 2012.</ref> In 2015 he was appointed the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecturer at Brown University.<ref>[1] Template:Webarchive, Brown University. Retrieved 28 April 2015.</ref> In 2018 he was awarded the President's Medal of the British Academy, the academy's highest honour in its suite of prizes and medals awarded for "outstanding service to the cause of the humanities and social sciences".<ref name="British Academy-2018">Template:Cite web</ref> He is also since 2021 an honorary fellow of the Bodleian Library. He was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2024.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He was named in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature and the arts.<ref>Template:London Gazette</ref> He is one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival in India.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Early life

William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1965 as the youngest son of Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet (1926–2018), Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian from 1987 to 2001, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent he is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great-nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf.<ref>Template:Cite AV media</ref> His brother Jock was a first-class cricketer. Dalrymple, the youngest of four brothers, grew up in North Berwick on the shores of the Firth of Forth.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He has described his childhood as being old-fashioned and "almost Edwardian". Among his forebears is a Mughal princess who married a Dalrymple ancestor.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Dalrymple was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first a history exhibitioner and then a senior history scholar.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Career

Curator

Dalrymple was the curator of Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857, a major show of the late Mughal painting for the Asia Society in New York, which ran from February to May 2012.<ref>Princes and Painters Template:Webarchive, Asia Society retrieved 4 October 2012.</ref> A catalogue of this exhibit co-edited by Dalrymple with Yuthika Sharma was published by Yale University Press, then later in India by Penguin, in 2012 under the same name.<ref name="William Dalrymple`s book on first Anglo" /> In 2019, he curated the exhibition of Company style painting, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, at the Wallace Collection in London.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Authorship

Dalrymple's interests include the history and art of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity. Every one of his ten books has won literary prizes. His first three were travel books based on his journeys in the Middle East, India and Central Asia. His early influences included travel writers such as Robert Byron,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Eric Newby, and Bruce Chatwin.

Dalrymple published a book of essays about current affairs in the Indian subcontinent, and four award-winning histories of the interaction between the East India Company and the peoples of India and Afghanistan between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, his "Company Quartet". His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books,<ref name="The New York Review of Books">Template:Cite web</ref> The Guardian,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> the New Statesman<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and The New Yorker.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> He has also written many articles for Time magazine. He was the Indian Subcontinent correspondent of the New Statesman from 2004 to 2014.Template:Citation needed Dalrymple covered the First and Second Intifadas as a journalist.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Lloyd-2024">Template:Cite web</ref>

He attended the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008, giving readings and taking workshops in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

His 2009 book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, a study of some of the more esoteric forms of modern Indian, and especially Hindu spirituality, was published by Bloomsbury, and like all his others, went to the number one slot on the Indian non-fiction best-seller list.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> After its publication he toured 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, Tevaram hymn singers as well as a prison warder and part-time Theyyam dancer widely believed to incarnate the god Vishnu.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, a history of the First Afghan War 1839–42, was published in India in December 2012,<ref name="William Dalrymple`s book on first Anglo">"William Dalrymple`s book on first Anglo-Afghan war out in December", Zee News.</ref> in the UK in February 2013, and in the US in April 2013. Dalrymple's great-great-granduncle Colin Mackenzie fought in the war and was briefly detained by the Afghans. Following the publication of the book Dalrymple was called to brief both the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the White House on the lessons to be learned from Afghan history.Template:Citation needed

In 2019 he published The Anarchy, a history of the Indian subcontinent during the period from 1739 to 1803, which saw the collapse of the Mughal imperial system,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> rise of the Maratha imperial confederacy, and the militarisation and rise to power of the East India Company.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> It was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019, and short listed for the Duke of Wellington medal for Military History, the Tata Book of the Year (Non-fiction) and the Historical Writers Association Book Award 2020. It was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Bronze Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

As at 2020 he was writing a book that is "a sweeping look at India's ideological colonisation of Asia, China and Europe during the short period between 250 BC to about 800 AD."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> This book was published in September 2024 and is titled The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

TV, radio and podcasts

Dalrymple has written and presented the six-part television series Stones of the Raj (Channel 4, August 1997),<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> the three-part Indian Journeys (BBC, August 2002)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and Sufi Soul (Channel 4, Nov 2005).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The six-part Stones of the Raj documents the stories behind some of British India's colonial architecture starting with Lahore (16 August 1997), The French Connection (23 August 1997), Calcutta (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 Ganga, takes Dalrymple on a journey to the Himalayas; the second part, City of Djinns, is based on his travel book of the same name, and takes a look at Delhi's history; lastly, Doubting Thomas takes Dalrymple to the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, with which Thomas the Apostle of Jesus is closely associated.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

He has done a six-part history series The Long Search for Radio 4.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In this series, Dalrymple searches to discover the spiritual roots of the British Isles. 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."

The BBC broadcast a documentary on 3 September 2015 entitled Love and Betrayal in India: The White Mughal,<ref>"A love story that broke the conventional boundaries of Empire", BBC September 2015.</ref> based on Dalrymple's book White Mughals.

Dalrymple was the historical consultant to ITV's 2019 series Beecham House.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2022 Dalrymple and the journalist Anita Anand created the podcast Empire, the first series of which examines the British East India Company and British involvement and influence on India.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The pair had previously collaborated on the book Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond. The Empire podcast went straight to No.1 in the UK Apple Podcast charts, had more than five million downloads in its first six months and was twice nominated for UK Podcast of the Year in the Broadcasting Press Guild Audio Awards.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Personal life

Dalrymple first went to Delhi on 26 January 1984,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and has lived in India on and off since 1989 and spends most of the year at his Mehrauli farmhouse in the outskirts of Delhi,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> but summers in London and Edinburgh.Template:Citation needed

Dalrymple's wife, Olivia Fraser, is an artist and comes from a family with long-standing connections to India. The couple have three children.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Fraser is related to the Scottish actress Rose Leslie.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Their son Sam Dalrymple is a historian and a co-founder of Project Dastaan, a peace initiative.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The English journalist and author Alice Albinia is his cousin.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Dalrymple has been critical of Israel's actions during the Gaza war and the United Kingdom's support for Israel.<ref name="Lloyd-2024" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In a 2024 interview with The Times, he made an analogy between Israel's response to the October 7 attacks and Britain's response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, saying, "The Mutiny has contemporary echoes. The same feeling that innocent women and children were attacked, and that it therefore provided a carte blanche for revenge and reprisals."<ref name="Lloyd-2024" /> In May 2025, Dalrymple signed an open letter calling the Gaza war a genocide.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In a September 2025 article for the New Statesman, Dalrymple argued that Britain had a historic responsibility to help establish a Palestinian state.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Bibliography

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Books

In Xanadu (1989)
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1994)
From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997)
The Age of Kali (1998)
White Mughals (2002)
The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006)
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. London, Bloomsbury (2009), Template:ISBN
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (2012), Template:ISBN
The Writer's Eye (2016), HarperCollins India, Template:ISBN
Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond (2017), Template:ISBN
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019), Template:ISBN
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024), Template:ISBN

Editor

Lonely Planet Sacred India. Lonely Planet Publications, (1999) Template:ISBN
Begums, Thugs & White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes (2002)
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857. Penguin Books India, (2012) Template:ISBN
Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company. Philip Wilson Publishers, (2020) Template:ISBN

Essays and reporting

Template:Cite journal<ref group=lower-alpha>Title in the online table of contents is "The mutual genocide of Indian Partition".</ref> (Review of the book Midnight's Furies by Nisid Hajari)

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Notes

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Awards and honours

In Xanadu received the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
City of Djinns received the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1995)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
From the Holy Mountain received the 1997 Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The Age of Kali (1998) won the 2005 French Prix d'Astrolabe.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002) won the 2001 Wolfson Prize for History.<ref name="The City Circle">Template:Cite web</ref>
Dalrymple was awarded the Mungo Park Medal in 2002 by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his outstanding contribution to travel literature.<ref name="Contemporary Writers: British Council">Template:Cite web</ref>
The television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which Dalrymple wrote and presented, won him the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The Long Search, Dalrymple's 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."<ref name="Contemporary Writers: British Council" />
White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002) won the 2003 Scottish Book of the Year Prize.<ref name="The City Circle"/>
Dalrymple's article on madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the 2005 FPA Media Awards.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The Sykes Medal in 2005 from the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his contribution "to understanding (of) contemporary Islam."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
An Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of St. Andrews in 2006 "for his services to literature and international relations, to broadcasting and understanding."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
The Last Mughal won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for History and Biography in February 2007.<ref name="The New York Review of Books"/>
Dalrymple received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of Lucknow in 2007 "for his outstanding contribution in literature and history."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
The Last Mughal won the 2007 Vodafone Crossword Book Award for best work in English non-fiction.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
An Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of Aberdeen (2008).<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
The 2008 Colonel James Tod Award given by the Maharana Mewar Foundation for achieving excellence in his field.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Nine Lives received the 2010 Asia House Award for Asian Literature.
The Media Citizen Puraskar by the Indian Confederation of NGOs for emphasising as an author issues of global importance and concern.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bradford for his contributions to creative writing, literature and the Indian Subcontinent history fields (2012).<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Edinburgh.<ref>University Of Edinburgh graduates, The Scotsman, 30 June 2015.</ref>
The 2015 Hemingway Prize for Return of a King.<ref>"Bloomsbury is Delighted to Announce That the Italian Edition of William Dalrymple's Return of a King", The Telegraph, 23 June 2015.</ref>
The 2015 Kapuściński Prize for Return of a King.<ref>William Dalrymple wins the Kapuściński Prize, David Godwin Associates, 14 September 2015.</ref><ref>Kapuściński Prize for RETURN OF A KING Bloomsbury India's Twitter account 11 September 2015.</ref>
Elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
He was awarded the President's Medal of the British Academy "for his literary achievements and for co-founding Jaipur Literary Festival".<ref name="British Academy-2018"/>
He was awarded the 2022 Minerva Medal of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow for his contribution to the writing of history.
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of York (2023).<ref>Horner, Emily Horner (17 July 2023), "University of York announce the honorary graduates for 2023", University of York.Template:Webarchive </ref>

Elected Honorary Fellow of the Association of Scottish Literature (2024)

References