William Dalrymple

William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple (born 20 March 1965) is a Scottish historian, art historian, indologist, curator, broadcaster, critic and author. Dalrymple's books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński, the Arthur Ross Medal of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, Mark Lynton History Prize and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. He has been five times long-listed 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 he 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 was 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. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to literature and the arts. He is one of the co-founders and co-directors of the world's largest writers' festival, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival in India.