Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 21 May
8:30 PM - 9:30 PM
William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer and director of India’s Jaipur literary festival. He fell in love with India aged eighteen, and the country has been at the centre of his writing since.
His latest book, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, is the last in what he calls the East India Company trilogy, following White Mughals and The Last Mughal.
It tells what happened when the British Governor-General of India was convinced to invade Afghanistan – in order to save India, ‘the jewel of the British empire’, from an imaginary Russian threat. Of course, this paved the path for subsequent wars … and sheds devastating light on the one being waged now.
Dalrymple has immersed himself in literature telling the Afghan side of the story; the result is, according to the Guardian, ‘a racy tale of imperial misadventure and Victorian jihadism’ that shows us ‘ourselves as others see us’.
William Dalrymple appears as part of a double-bill with Anita Desai. Book your discounted tickets to both sessions here.
Featuring
William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s greatest historians and the author of the classic In Xanadu, the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals and the Hemingway Prize-winning Return of a King. A master of microhistories, William Dalrymple has turned his hand for the first time to macro-history in The Anarchy.
A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by The British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. William lives with his wife, three children and his beloved flock of goats on a farm outside Delhi in India. William Dalrymple was Historical Advisor to a major new ITV period drama about the East India Company called Beecham House, which will air in the UK this year.