William Dalrymple

William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple (born 20 March 1965) is a Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, broadcaster and critic. He spends a significant amount of his time in India. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.

Dalrymple's 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 History Prize. 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 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. 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." He is also since 2021 an Honorary Fellow of the Bodleian Library. He served as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2024.

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. Provided by Wikipedia