William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller "In Xanadu" when he was twenty-two. In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi to research his second book, "City of Djinns", which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. "From the Holy Mountain", his acclaimed study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997. A collection of his writings about India, "The Age of Kali", was published in 1998.
William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society, and in 2002 was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his 'outstanding contribution to travel literature'. His "White Mughals" won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize.
He is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now divide their time between London and Delhi.
