Sh. William Dalrymple

Shri William Dalrymple is the author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuściński Prize-winning Return of a King. The Anarchy won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations, and The Golden Road won the 2026 Mark Lynton History Prize.

He has been awarded seven honorary doctorates and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, where he is currently an Honorary Bodleian Fellow and a visiting fellow at All Souls. In 2018 he was presented with the President's Medal by the British Academy, and in 2020 he was named one of the world's top fifty thinkers by Prospect. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival and, with Anita Anand, presenter of the chart-topping Empire podcast, which has crossed ninety million downloads. He lives with his family on a goat farm outside Delhi.