William Dalrymple Biography

William Dalrymple was born in 1965 in Scotland and grew up on the Firth of Forth's beaches. He attended Ampleforth School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a History Exhibitioner and then a Senior History Scholar. He set out on foot to follow Marco Polo's outer path from Jerusalem to Mongolia in 1986, while still in college and authored a widely praised novel about the voyage, In Xanadu, when he was twenty-two. The book was nominated for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and received the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1990. It was also shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. Dalrymple relocated to Delhi in 1989 to work on his second book, City of Djinns, which received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award in 1994. His famous study of Christianity's collapse in its Middle Eastern origin, From the Holy Mountain, won the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award in 1997, and it was also shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize. The Age of Kali, a compilation of his essays about India, earned the French Prix D'Astrolabe in 2005. He switched genres in 1999, and after four trip novels, he focused on historical writing. White Mughals were released in 2003, and it received the Wolfson Honor, Britain's most prestigious history prize. The Scottish Book of the Year Prize was also given to it, and it was nominated for the PEN History Award, the Kiryama Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Ralph Fiennes, an Academy Award winner, will direct a major movie picture adaptation of the novel. The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, earned the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for History, India's most prestigious literary honor, and was hailed as a "masterpiece" by the New York Review of Books. It was also on the Samuel Johnson Prize shortlist. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, released in 2009, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and received the Asia House Literary Award. ‘A beautiful combination of anthropology, history, and the history of religions, wrapped in prose worthy of a decent book,' Wendy Doniger said in the TLS. Nobody has done a better job of evoking rural India since Rudyard Kipling. Only a superb writer like Dalrymple could pull off this incredible and unparalleled revelation of the humanity of individuals at the very edge of religious ecstasy.' Dalrymple toured the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Holland, and Australia with a band that included Sufis, Fakirs, Bauls, Theveram hymn singers, and a prison warder and part-time Theyyam dancer widely believed to be an incarnation of the God Vishnu, performing music and poetry from the book. Dalrymple produced and released The Rough Guide to Sufi Music in 2011. He created and hosted three television series for Channel 4, including Stones of the Raj (Channel 4), Sufi Soul (Channel 4), and Indian Journeys (BBC/PBS), the latter of which received the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. The Long Search, his Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism, received the Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting in 2002, and the judges praised it as "thrilling in its brilliance." The Royal Scottish Geographical Society gave him the Mungo Park Medal in 2002 for his "exceptional contribution to travel literature." He was given the James Todd Memorial Prize in March 2008, and the Media Citizen Puraskar by the Indian Confederation of NGOs in 2011 for stressing topics of global relevance and concern as an author. His piece on Pakistan's madrasas won the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the 2005 Foreign Press Association Media Awards in December 2005. He has three honorary doctorates of letters: one from the University of St Andrews for his contributions to literature, international relations, broadcasting, and understanding, another from the University of Lucknow for his outstanding contribution to literature and history, and a third from the University of Aberdeen. Two more will be received next year, from the Universities of Chichester and Bradford. William Dalrymple is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Asiatic Society. He is the New Statesman's India reporter and a regular writer to the New Yorker, the Guardian, the TLS, and the New York Review of Books. He just completed The Return of a King: the First Battle for Afghanistan 1839–42, which will be released in India in December 2012, the United Kingdom in February 2013, and the United States in April 2013. For the Asia Society in New York, he co-curated a significant exhibition on Late Mughal Art, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857, which ran from February to May 2012. At Princeton University, he is the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in Humanities. William is married to Olivia Fraser, an artist, and they have three children together. They currently reside on a farm outside of Delhi.

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