Historian William Dalrymple awarded the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize 2026

The 2026 Mark Lynton History Prize has been awarded to William Dalrymple for his book, “THE GOLDEN ROAD: How Ancient India Transformed the World”. for combining “literary grace, commitment to serious research and social concern”. The Mark Lynton History Prize is an annual $10,000 award given to a book "of history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual or scholarly distinction with felicity of expression". The prize is one of three awards given as part of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and by the Columbia University School of Journalism. The Mark Lynton History Prize, is named for the late Mark Lynton, a business executive and author of “Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee’s Memoir of World War II.”

Lynton was an avid proponent of the writing of history, and the Lynton family has sponsored the Lukas Prize Project since its inception. Previous winners include Adam Hochschild, Jill Lepore and Robert Caro. The other shortlists in this category were:Nicholas Boggs for Baldwin: A Love StorySven Beckert for Capitalism: A Global HistorySiddharth Kara for The Zorg: Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of SlaveryMartha A. Sandweiss for The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West

Speaking on the occasion, William Dalrymple said: “I am completely thrilled to win this wonderful prize, not least because previous winners include some of the historians I most admire: Adam Hochschild, Rebecca Solnit, Pekka Hämäläinen, Jill Lepore, Kathleen Duval and Robert Caro. I am honoured to join their ranks. With warmest thanks to the Lynton family and the Harvard & Columbia Universities”. Commenting on the achievement, Rahul Srivastava, Managing Director, Bloomsbury India, said “We are immensely proud of William Dalrymple on this outstanding recognition.

The Golden Road exemplifies the very best of historical writing—deeply researched, compellingly told, and globally relevant. This award is a testament not only to William’s scholarship but also to the enduring significance of India’s civilisational legacy in shaping the world”. About the bookIndia is the forgotten heart of the ancient world. 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 oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia.

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 China, 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 our world today as we know it.William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapucinski Prize-winning Return of a King.

His most recent book, The Anarchy, was shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington medal, the Tata Book of the Year and the Historical Writers Association Award, was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations.

Dalrymple has been awarded six honorary doctorates, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown and Oxford, where he is currently an Honorary Bodleian fellow and a visiting follow at All Souls. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.