As part of the Temple Trail, William Dalrymple will travel in and around the city here to explore the temples with tourists from all over the world. He will also be travelling to the Buddhist circuit destinations of Udayagiri, Khandagiri and Ratnagiri followed by a visit to the Konark temple.
Secretary, Tourism and Sports, Vishal K Dev said, “I would like to thank William for accepting our invitation to come over and explore the temples of Odisha with locals and tourists. I would encourage more and more people to join him in the trail.”
William said, “I would like to thank Odisha Tourism for inviting me over. I can’t wait to return to one of my favourite States in India, and explore the magnificent temples and the exquisite cuisines.”
William is the author of nine books about India and the Islamic world, including City of Djinns (Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Prize), White Mughals (Wolfson Prize for History and SAC Scottish Book of the Year Prize), The Last Mughal (Duff Cooper Prize and Vodafone Award for Non-Fiction) and Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Asia House Literary Award).
He recently curated a major show of Mughal art for the Asia Society in New York, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42 was published in 2012 and won the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prizes and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper and PEN Hessel-Tiltman History Prizes. In 2016 he published a history of the Koh-i-Noor, co-written with Anita Anand.
He writes regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the Guardian, and is one of the founders and a co-director of the Jaipur Literary Festival. He has honorary doctorates of letters from the universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Bradford and Lucknow, and visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown.
This year he was awarded the President’s medal of the British Academy. For most of the year he lives on a farm outside Delhi with his wife Olivia and his three children, Ibby, Sam and Adam.
