William Dalrymple is a historian and writer. His interests include Asia, India, the Middle East, the Crusades, Mughal rule as well as the world of Islam and early eastern Christianity. He has written many prize winning and bestselling books on the above subjects. His first three books were travel narratives based on his colourful travels through the Middle East and Central Asia; he also published a book of essays about India, and two acclaimed history books about the interaction between the British and the Mughals between the eighteenth and mid nineteenth century.
Dalrymple was born William Hamilton-Dalrymple, the son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple Bt., in Scotland in 1965 and was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first history exhibitioner then senior history scholar. He is married to the artist Olivia Fraser and has three children.
He is a fellow of many prestigious literary and geographical societies, in recognition of his work. His contribution to British popular understanding of culture and history have included numerous television series and a radio show.
His first book, In Xanadu (1989), was the result of his journey across the Asian continent, from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the site of Shangdu, famed as Xanadu in English literature, in Outer Mongolia. This was an attempt to reach Asia from the UK. The journey was taken on a multitude of types of transport and lasted for over six months. The purpose of the journey as outlined in the book was to investigate the world of the Silk Road even though the author never made it anywhere close to many of the major posts on the Silk Road such as Xian, Dunhuang, etc.
The book, which was written when the author was only 22, received rapturous reviews and won numerous awards, and establishing Dalrymple as a major new arrival on the British literary scene. The great Patrick Leigh Fermor, regarded by the author as the greatest living travel writer, chose In Xanadu as his book of the Year in the Spectator and wrote, "William Dalrymple's In Xanadu carries us breakneck from a predawn glimmer in the Holy Sepulchre right across Asia... It is learned and comic, and a most gifted first book touched by the spirits of Kinglake, Robert Byron and E. Waugh." Sir Alec Guinness agreed, and in the Sunday Times called the book "The delightful, and funny, surprise mystery tour of the year."
His second book City of Djinns followed in 1994. The book was mainly the result of a six-year stay in Delhi. Dalrymple attempted to uncover the various layers of both old and new Delhi. He examined the traumatic events of the Partition of India, the 1984 riots after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the ancient Hindu origin of the city, Mughal and British Colonial rule, as well as the Sikh community. The book followed his established style of historical digressions, tied in with contemporary events and a multitude of anecdotes.
His third book From the Holy Mountain (1997), regarded by many as his masterpiece, saw him attempt to trace the ties of Eastern Orthodox congregations scattered in the Middle East to their ancient origins; it also deals with the question of how they have fared over centuries of Islamic rule.
According to Peter Levi, “Any travel writer who is so good at his job as to be brilliant, applauded, loved and needed has to have an unusual list of qualities, and William Dalrymple has them all in aces. Dalrymple’s ear for conversation is as good as Alan Bennett’s. The best and most unexpected book I have read since I forget when.”
Sarah Wheeler writing in the Independent agreed, calling the book "A rich stew of history and travel narrative spiced with anecdote, opinion and bon mots … The future of travel literature lies in the hands of gifted authors like Dalrymple who shine their torches into the shadowy hinterland of the human story – the most foreign territory of all.”
His fourth book, The Age of Kali (1998), saw him return to the subject of India. The book is a collection of essays collected through almost a decade of travel around the sub-continent. It deals with many controversial subjects such as Sati, the caste wars in India, political corruption and terrorism.
According to Katherine Frank writing in the Literary Review, the book was 'Fascinating ... Dalrymple hasn't just swarmed around South Asia visiting architectural ruins and interviewing relics of the Raj. He has also gone to places that few, if any, tourists will ever see, sometimes at considerable personal risk.
Here he reprises some brilliant reportage from these unorthodox journeys and includes a series of penetrating profiles. The Age of Kali is far from uncritical, but as Dalrymple says, "it is a work of love". Again and again he summons perfectly modulated prose - comic, tragic, ironic by turns - to evoke his passion.'
The Financial Times echoed the praise: "The most admired young travel writer in Britain today is the industrious and preternaturally talented William Dalrymple, without whose presence all prize-lists seem grotesquely naked. With The Age of Kali he has pulled it off again ... Witty and eagle-eyed, Dalrymple is, above everything, a fine observer and reporter."
This book was published in India as At the Court of the Fish-Eyed Goddess: Travels In the Indian Subcontinent (1998).
His fifth major book White Mughals (2002) is an important work of social history about the unexpectedly warm relations that existed between the British and Indians in the 18th and early 19th century, when one in three British men was married to an Indian woman. At the heart of the book is the story of an affair, which saw a British dignitary convert to Islam and marry a woman of royal Mughal descent. The work, complete with the analysis of sources, has won acclaim as both a work of literary and historical merit.
Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Professor Francis Robinson described the books as, "Moving, wide-ranging and richly textured... Through massive research blessed with serendipity, and through imagination and empathy, Dalrymple has evoked the world of the British in late 18th century India as no one has before... A wonderful book, a story of love and the humanity we share."
Frank McLynn in the Independent on Sunday agreed, "Love and war are usually thought to inhabit different spheres and, except in Tolstoy, we do not expect them to mix. Part of the achievement of this magnificent book is the way William Dalrymple effortlessly melds the two motifs so that the public story of the British conquest of India and the poignant tale of a love affair interpenetrate, with each adding a dimension to the other."
"Much of Dalrymple's narrative has the pace of a thriller... [but] above all this book is a bravura display of scholarship, writing and insight. No brief review can do justice to its manifold excellence and all one can say is that Dalrymple manages the incredible feat of out pointing most historians and novelists in one go. This is quite simply a stunning achievement."
Dalrymple recently published his sixth book The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 to great acclaim. Max Hastings in the London Sunday Times of the 1st October 2006 wrote "Dalrymple is an outstandingly gifted travel writer and historian who excels himself in his latest work... This is an angry book as well as a very good one."
The historian David Gilmour agreed, writing in the Spectator of this "brilliant new book... a magnificent, multi-dimensional book which shames the simplistic efforts of previous writers… Dalrymple used to be a fine travel writer with a sense of history and has now become a fine historian with a sense of place."
According to David Arnold in the Times Literary Supplement of the 24th November 2006, "There is so much to admire in this book- the depth of historical research, the finely evocative writing, the extraordinary rapport with the world of late Mughal India. It is also in many ways a remarkably humane and egalitarian history… [and a] splendid work of empathetic scholarship. As the 150th anniversary of the uprising dawns, there will be many attempts to revisit these bloody, chaotic, cataclysmic events; but few reinterpretations of 1857 will be as bold, as insightful, or as challenging as this."
In addition, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has written that "William Dalrymple's captivating book is not only great reading, it contributes very substantially too our understanding of the remarkable history of The Mughal empire in its dying days … It is rare indeed that a work of such consummate scholarship and insight could also be so accessible and such fun to read."