The Golden Road with William Dalrymple

This event will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre Pigott Theatre. It will be simultaneously live streamed on the British Library platform. Tickets may be booked either to attend in person (physical) or to watch on our platform (online) either live or within 48 hours on catch up. Viewing links for the online version will be sent out in the confirmation email you receive after booking.

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation - creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.  

William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India’s position as the heart of ancient Eurasia and for the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of Japan, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and the world today as we know it. 

Purchase a copy of The Golden Road by William Dalrymple and get a discounted event ticket with our book and ticket bundle. The bundle price is £44.00 and includes in-person access to this event. Please note: books can only be collected in person, the bundle is not available for online viewers and postal orders are not available. 

Doors and Bar open at 18:00. If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event. Followed by a book signing. 

Half price tickets available for British Library Members, Students, Under 26 and other concession groups.  

William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s most acclaimed and read historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals; The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. 

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