William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. An internationally acclaimed writer and historian, he wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was 22.

City of Djinns won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award; From the Holy Mountain won the Scottish Book of the Year Prize; The Age of Kali won the French Prix D'Astrolabe; and White Mughals won the 2003 Wolfson Prize for History and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize.

The Last Mughal was longlisted for the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. His latest book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009), and is a distillation of 25 years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions.

William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.

Website: www.williamdalrymple.uk.com

Books

Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story.

Exquisite and mesmerizing, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the region's rapid change.

Nine Lives is a distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, taking you deep into worlds that you would never have imagined even existed.