Multi award-winning author and historian William Dalrymple comes to the festival to share the remarkable story behind his latest multi-book release, The Company Quartet. 

This sweeping and deeply-layered work utilises two decades of meticulous research to offer a glimpse behind the curtain at the rise and fall of the world’s first global corporate power, the East India Company, spanning four books and two hundred years of the history of the Indian sub-continent and the British Empire.

Join Dalrymple as he talks about this epic and resonant tale, and its continued relevance to the subcontinent and Britain of today.

About The Speaker

William Dalrymple is a guest speaker at Bradford Literature Festival 2022

William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s greatest historians and the author of the classic In Xanadu, the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals and the Hemingway Prize-winning Return of a King. A master of micro-histories, William Dalrymple has turned his hand for the first time to macro-history in The Anarchy. A frequent broad-caster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002.

In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by The British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. William Dalrymple was Historical Advisor to the major new ITV period drama, Beecham House, about the East India Company that aired last summer. He has also curated an exhibition for the Wallace Collection, the first UK exhibition of Indian paintings commissioned by East India Company officials in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which will be on display from December 2019. William lives with his wife, three children and his beloved flock of goats on a farm outside Delhi.