William Dalrymple - The Koh-I-Noor diamond

William Dalrymple was born and raised in Scotland and educated at Ampleforth and Trinity College, Cambridge.In 1986, while still at college, he set off to follow on foot the outward route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia and wrote a highly acclaimed bestseller about the journey, In Xanadu, when he was twenty-two. In 1989 Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for five years researching his second book, City of Djinns. Two more acclaimed travel books followed, before Dalrymple changed genres to history, writing two extensive histories of great Indian ruling dynasties and several more including Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Asiatic Society, and is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the Guardian, the TLS, and the New York Review of Books, and is the India correspondent of the New Statesman. His latest book, a joint project with author and broadcaster Anita Anand, is Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond.