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.
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1965 as the youngest son of Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet (1926–2018), Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian from 1987 to 2001, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent he is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great-nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf. His brother Jock was a first-class cricketer. Dalrymple, the youngest of four brothers, grew up in North Berwick on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He has described his childhood as being old-fashioned and "almost Edwardian". Among his forebears is a Mughal princess who married a Dalrymple ancestor.
Dalrymple was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first a history exhibitioner and then a senior history scholar.
Dalrymple was the curator of Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857, a major show of the late Mughal painting for the Asia Society in New York, which ran from February to May 2012. A catalogue of this exhibit co-edited by Dalrymple with Yuthika Sharma was published by Yale University Press, then later in India by Penguin, in 2012 under the same name. In 2019, he curated the exhibition of Company style painting, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, at the Wallace Collection in London.
Dalrymple's interests include the history and art of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jains and early Eastern Christianity. Every one of his ten books has won literary prizes. His first three were travel books based on his journeys in the Middle East, India and Central Asia. His early influences included travel writers such as Robert Byron, Eric Newby, and Bruce Chatwin.
Dalrymple published a book of essays about current affairs in the Indian subcontinent, and four award-winning histories of the interaction between the East India Company and the peoples of India and Afghanistan between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, his "Company Quartet". His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the New Statesman and The New Yorker. He has also written many articles for Time magazine. He was the Indian Subcontinent correspondent of the New Statesman from 2004 to 2014. Dalrymple covered the First and Second Intifadas as a journalist.
He attended the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008, giving readings and taking workshops in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem.
His 2009 book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, a study of some of the more esoteric forms of modern Indian, and especially Hindu spirituality, was published by Bloomsbury, and like all his others, went to the number one slot on the Indian non-fiction best-seller list. After its publication he toured the UK, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, Holland and the US with a band consisting of some of the people featured in his book including Sufis, Fakirs, Bauls, Tevaram hymn singers as well as a prison warder and part-time Theyyam dancer widely believed to incarnate the god Vishnu.
Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, a history of the First Afghan War 1839–42, was published in India in December 2012, in the UK in February 2013, and in the US in April 2013. Dalrymple's great-great-granduncle Colin Mackenzie fought in the war and was briefly detained by the Afghans. Following the publication of the book Dalrymple was called to brief both the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the White House on the lessons to be learned from Afghan history.
In 2019 he published The Anarchy, a history of the Indian subcontinent during the period from 1739 to 1803, which saw the collapse of the Mughal imperial system, rise of the Maratha imperial confederacy, and the militarisation and rise to power of the East India Company. It was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019, and short listed for the Duke of Wellington medal for Military History, the Tata Book of the Year (Non-fiction) and the Historical Writers Association Book Award 2020. It was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Bronze Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. The book faced a mixed reception from professional historians, with Rudrangshu Mukherjee describing it as "delightful storytelling" but objecting that "one misses the analysis." Priya Satia praised the book as a "gripping" and "epic" saga but noted that "Dalrymple’s literary commitments and tight focus on the Company constrain it from grappling fully with the realities of colonialism."
As at 2020 he was writing a book that is "a sweeping look at India's ideological colonisation of Asia, China and Europe during the short period between 250 BC to about 800 AD." This book was published in September 2024 and is titled The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.
He is one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival in India. It has been called "the greatest literary show on earth". The 2018 edition contained a discussion on the #MeToo movement. The festival faced criticism for hosting C.P. Surendran, Suhel Seth and Chetan Bhagat, who were accused of sexual assault. MJ Akbar was scheduled to appear at the festival in 20222 but was removed after a social media backlash alleging that the festival wanted to rehabilitate him after he was accused of sexual harassment.
Dalrymple has written and presented the six-part television series Stones of the Raj (Channel 4, August 1997), the three-part Indian Journeys (BBC, August 2002) and Sufi Soul (Channel 4, Nov 2005).
The six-part Stones of the Raj documents the stories behind some of British India's colonial architecture starting with Lahore (16 August 1997), The French Connection (23 August 1997), Calcutta (30 August 1997), The Fatal Friendship (6 September 1997), Surrey in Tibet (13 September 1997), and concluded with The Magnificent Ruin (20 September 1997).