A collection of his writings about India, The Age of Kali, won the French Prix D’Astrolabe in 2005. 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 it was also shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching 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. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award it was also shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

He wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor's power.

Nonetheless, Zafar-a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment-created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history.

The last mughal by william dalrymple