William Dalrymple Popular Books
William Dalrymple Biography & Facts
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple (born 20 March 1965) is a India-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, photographer, broadcaster and critic. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Wolfson Prize for History, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński, the Arthur Ross Medal of the US 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 longlisted and once shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History. 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.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."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. A catalogue of this exhibit co-edited by Dalrymple with Yuthika Sharma was published by Penguin in 2012 under the same name. More recently he curated the exhibition of Company style painting, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, at the Wallace Collection in London.In 2012, Dalrymple was appointed a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities by Princeton University. In 2015, he was appointed the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecturer at Brown University. He is also since 2021 an Honorary Fellow of the Bodleian Library and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University He was named in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.Dalrymple was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature and the arts. Personal life Dalrymple is the son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet of North Berwick and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent, he is the third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great nephew of Virginia Woolf. His brother, Jock, was a first-class cricketer. He was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first a history exhibitioner and then a senior history scholar.Dalrymple first went to Delhi on 26 January 1984, 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, but summers in London and Edinburgh. His wife, Olivia, is an artist and comes from a family with long-standing connections to India. The couple have three children. His wife is related to Scottish actress Rose Leslie.One of his sons, Sam Dalrymple, is a historian and a cofounder of a peace initiative called Project Dastaan.The English journalist and author Alice Albinia is his cousin. Interests and influence 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, 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, The Guardian, the New Statesman and The New Yorker. He has also written many articles for Time magazine. He was the Indian Subcontinent correspondent of the New Statesman from 2004-2014. He attended the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008, giving readings and taking workshops in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem.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. 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.Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, a history of the First Afghan War 1839–42, was published in India in December 2012, 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.His most recent book, published in 2019, is The Anarchy, a history of the Indian Subcontinent during the period from 1739 to 1803, which saw the collapse of the Mughal imperial system, rise of the Maratha imperial confederacy, and the militarisation and rise to power of the East India Company. 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.As of 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." TV and radio 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).... Discover the William Dalrymple popular books. Find the top 100 most popular William Dalrymple books.
Best Seller William Dalrymple Books of 2024
-
Sound Bites
Alex KapranosIn September 2005, Alex Kapranos began writing about what he ate while touring the world with the rock band Franz Ferdinand. The writing is as much about where he eats and the peop...
-
Tales of Crimes Past
Sunil NairAn AngloIndian Couple Plotting Murder.A British Resident Nursing Conspiracy Theories.Professional Poisoners Leaving a Trail of Death.The criminal fraternity in colonial India was a...
-
Mirror To Damascus
Colin ThubronA 50th anniversary edition of Colin Thubron's celebrated first book, a portrait of Syria's capital city, with a new introduction by the author.Described by the author as simply 'a ...
-
A New Voyage Round the World
William Dampier & Nicholas Thomas'A roaring tale ... remains as vivid and exciting today as it was on publication in 1697' GuardianThe pirate and adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, a...
-
White Mughals
William DalrympleWhite Mughals is the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that crossed and transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.J...
-
Around India in 80 Trains
Monisha Rajesh"Crackles and sparks with life like an exploding box of Diwali fireworks." William DalrympleIn 1991, Monisha Rajesh's family uprooted from Sheffield to Madras in the hope of makin...
-
Kublai Khan
John ManIn Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure dome decreeKublai Khan lives on in the popular imagination thanks to these two lines of poetry by Coleridge. But the true story behind th...
-
Plats du Jour
William BlackThere is more than a slight malaise in the air these days about French food and cooking. While the rest of the world delights in the intricacies of molecular gastronomy and even Br...
-
American Notes
Charles Dickens'Like Shakespeare, Dickens was able to embrace a whole world' John MortimerWhen Charles Dickens set out for America in 1842, he was the most famous man of his day to make the journ...
-
The Venetian Empire
Jan MorrisFor six centuries the Republic of Venice was a maritime empire, its sovereign power extending throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean – an empire of coasts, islands and isolat...
-
The Last Mughal
William DalrympleIn this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, awardwinning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigat...
-
The Patient Assassin
Anita AnandThe “compelling [and] vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) true story of a man who claimed to be a survivor of a 1919 British massacre in India, his elaborate twentyyear plan fo...
-
Crossing Continents
Duncan Campbell-SmithFor almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London's overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of the British Empire. Foremost among them from the be...
-
Bullet Proof
Matt Croucher GCAFGHANISTAN, FEBRUARY 2008: in an outofcontrol, dangerous country torn apart by war, littered with Taliban guerrilla forces and thousands of miles from home, Lance Corporal Matt Cr...
-
Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants
HerodotusSo much of what we know of the Ancient World comes from Herodotus (c.490 BC c.420 BC) that he will always remain the greatest of historians. But in addition such a large part of t...
-
The Age of Kali
William DalrympleFrom the author of The Last Mughal and Nine Lives: the classic stories he gathered during the ten years he spent journeying across the Indian subcontinent, from Sri Lanka and south...
-
Delhi and Agra
Michael AlexanderDelhi claims a noble history as the site of at least seven capitals dating from before the time of Alexander the Great. The glorious Mogul Empire brought great riches to the city a...
-
Listening to Britain
Jeremy A Crang & Paul AddisonFrom May to September 1940, a period that saw some of the most dramatic events in British history including the evacuation of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the opening stages...
-
Return of a King
William DalrympleFrom William Dalrympleawardwinning historian, journalist and travel writera masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an importa...
-
The Underworld Captain
Alexander Shannon & David LeslieAlexander Shannon escaped a shady past to enjoy a glittering career in the army, only to end up back in the thick of criminal activity.Shannon's time as a soldier saw him posted to...
-
Two Wheels In The Dust
Anne MustoeIndia is no place for the fainthearted cyclist. The streets are jammed with cars, busses, rickshaws, animals, fortunetellers, barbers, beggars and people sleeping or cooking. Follo...
-
The Making Of The British Army
Allan MallinsonEdgehill, 1642: Surveying the disastrous scene in the aftermath of the first battle of the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell realized that war could no longer be waged in the old,...
-
City of Djinns
William DalrymplePeeling back the layers of Delhi’s centuriesold history, City of Djinns is an irresistible blend of research and adventure.Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels ba...
-
From Aintree to York
Stephen CartmellWriter and psychologist Stephen Cartmell set off to explore Britain using the cultural melting pot of the UK's 60 racecourses as his staging posts. During his travels the author ob...
-
The Celts
Alice Roberts'Informed, impeccably researched and written' Neil OliverThe Celts are one of the world's most mysterious ancient people. In this compelling account, Alice Roberts takes us on a jo...
-
Viceroys
Christopher LeeBetween 1858 and 1947, twenty British men ruled millions of some of the most remarkable people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.From the Indian Mutiny to the cruel religio...
-
Spending Time With Walter
John Hartley WilliamsThe long poem at the centre of John Hartley Williams' new collection is a dramatic monologue narrated by a laconic, possibly lamed, forest dweller, a lowly crewmember on a barg...
-
In Search Of The First Civilizations
Michael WoodFive thousand years ago there began the most momentous revolution in human history. Starting in Mesopotamia, city civilization emerged for the first time on earth, to be followed i...
-
For Love and Courage
E. W. Hermon & Anne NasonLt Colonel E.W. Hermon died in a hail of bullets on the 9th April 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, leading his men of the 24th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers into th...
-
From the Holy Mountain
William DalrympleIn the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bos...
-
In Xanadu
William DalrympleWilliam Dalrymple’s awardwinning first book: his classic, fiercely intelligent and wonderfully entertaining account of his journey across Marco Polo’s 700yearold route from Jerusal...
-
Tears of the Begums
Khwaja Hasan Nizami & Rana SafviApart from the fifteen years that Sher Shah Suri snatched upon defeating Humayun, the flag of the grand Mughal Empire flew over Delhi undefeated for over 300 years. But then, 1857 ...
-
Against the Flow
Tom Fort'You have to be on your guard when you go back to special places. You may be able to locate them easily enough on the map, but maps tell only one story. Times change and places and...
-
The Laws of Manu
Wendy DonigerThe Laws of Manu form a towering work of Hindu philosophy. Composed by many Brahmin priests, this is an extraordinary, encyclopaedic representation of human life in the world, and ...
-
Culture and Anarchy
Matthew Arnold"Culture and Anarchy" is Arnold's most famous piece of writing on culture which established his High Victorian cultural agenda and remained dominant in debate from the ...
-
The Hike
Don ShawFreddy, Phil and Don are three grumpy old men, travelling at various speeds in the slow lane of retirement, at a loss to understand the mad modern world around them.Their chosen me...
-
A Coup in Turkey
Jeremy SealThe most dramatic, revealing and littleknown story in Turkey's history which illuminates the nation'Through the spellbinding career of a single, illfated leader, Jeremy Seal illum...
-
Treading Grapes
Rosemary GeorgeTuscany offers some of the most spectacular scenery in Europe. The unique combination of cypress trees and olive groves mingling with vineyards and woods on undulating hillsides is...
-
The Story of Mankind - Illustrated History of the Human Civilization Retold for Children
Hendrik Willem Van LoonThe Story of Mankind covers the history of western civilization beginning with primitive man, the development of writing, art, and architecture, the rise of major religions, and th...
-
Time Pieces
Nayanjot Lahiri'There are many missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is ancient India, but those we have yield a rich tapestry.'The oldest surviving love graffiti on a cave wall immortalizing ...