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. On top of that, he has splendidly conveyed the sheer joy of researching a piece of history, something every true historian knows, telling of his elation at discovering in Burma's national archives all Zafar's prison records, stored in Acrobat PDF files - 'something the British Library has so far failed to achieve.'Īamer Hussein of The Independent noted, ĭalrymple's recreation of the city of Delhi under siege forms the monumental backdrop to the tragic figure of the eponymous monarch, the 'last Mughal.' Aged 82 and abidingly fond of the arts of peace, Bahadur Shah Zafar was chosen as a mascot by an army seen as rebels and mutineers by the British, and as freedom fighters by some nationalist historians.William Dalrymple was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He has vividly described the street life of the Mughal capital in the days before the catastrophe happened, he has put his finger deftly on every crucial point in the story, which earlier historians have sometimes missed, and he has supplied some of the most informative footnotes I have ever read. Geoffrey Moorhouse of The Guardian wrote, ĭalrymple has here written an account of the Indian mutiny such as we have never had before, of the events leading up to it and of its aftermath, seen through the prism of the last emperor's life. The book won the 2006 Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for History and Biography, and the 2007 Vodafone Crossword Book Award. He worked on these documents in association with the Urdu scholar Mahmood Farooqui.

The book, Dalrymple's sixth, and his second to reflect his long love affair with the city of Delhi, won praise for its use of 'The Mutiny Papers', which included previously ignored Indian accounts of the events of 1857.

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 is a 2006 historical book by William Dalrymple. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple