William Dalrymple was born in 1965 and is a historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a broadcaster and critic. His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and the Wolfson Prizes. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.

In 2018, he was awarded the President’s Medal of the British Academy. The BBC television documentary on his pilgrimage to the source of the river Ganga, “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 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 was also named in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.

He was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first a history exhibitioner and then a senior history scholar.

(Source: Wikipedia)