Summary
IT'S JUNE 2, 2003, AND I AM IN WILLIAM Dalrymple's garden the day his life starts to turn round. The day before began with the bank manager on the phone pointedly noting he'd done nothing about paying back his GBP 27,000 overdraft, that all the requisite warnings had been issued and financially dire consequences were just a day or so away.
Four hours later, another telephone call. The organisers of the Wolfson History Prize ring to tell him he's won GBP 10,000 for White Mughals, his spellbinding story of the love between an English ambassador and an Indian princess at the end of the 18th century. And I'm in his garden because I know the novel's just won another GBP 10,000 as the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and I'm writing a feature about him.See the full content of this document
Extract
History's Mutineer
We don't know the half of it, then, William Dalrymple and me, as we sit out in the sun outside his Queen Anne cottage in Chiswick. We don't know that White Mughals will go on to be picked as one of the first books chosen by Richard & Judy, that its sales will double to 200,000 as a result; that plans will be drawn up for a film, that a stage adaptation (by Christopher Hampton, no less) will be staged at the National Theatre next year and a film version may follow. We don't yet know that he will change publishers, that Bloomsbury will offer him an astronomical deal for his next six books, a deal that will keep him working for the next 20 years writing a history of...
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