William Dalrymple

Writers bio:
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award.

In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for four and a half years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third book, From the Holy Mountain, was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997, and was shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters, a collection Dalrymple's essays on India written over the last ten years, was published in 1998.

William Dalrymple’s most recent book, White Mughals, won the Wolfson Prize for History. He is now at work on a Mughal Quartet, four books telling the story of the Great Mughals from the time of Babur to the last Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. The first volume will be published by Bloomsbury next Autumn.

Dalrymple was recently elected the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Asiatic Society. He is married and has a son and daughter.