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. City of Djinns won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. The Age of Kali won the French Prix D'Astrolabe, Return of a King won the 2015 Hemingway Prize, and White Mughals won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize. The Last Mughal was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. His most recent book is The Anarchy. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Dehli.

His most ambitious yet, taking the reader into lurid, scarcely imaginable worlds of mysticism . . . Dalrymple has an inimitable way of conjuring the Indian landscape