Name: An evening with William Dalrymple
Start: 2026-02-01T16:30:00+00:00
End: 2026-02-01T18:00:00+00:00
Location: Down Lane, GU3 1DQ Guildford, United Kingdom

Join us for a special evening with William Dalrymple—bestselling author, acclaimed historian, and podcast host—as he brings to life the vivid, extraordinary world of the Pattle sisters through the story of his great-great-grandmother, Sophia Dalrymple (née Pattle).
Created for Watts Gallery, this one-off talk draws on new writing from the exhibition’s accompanying publication. Dalrymple will trace his own ancestral connections to the exhibition, revealing Sophia Dalrymple as a devoted supporter, muse, and close friend of G. F. Watts, and offering fresh insight into the artistic and personal circles that shaped the period.
About William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals (Harper Collins, 2002), The Last Mughal (Bloomsbury, 2006), which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuściński Prize-winning Return of a King (Bloomsbury, 2014). The Anarchy (Bloomsbury, 2019) won the Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. A frequent broadcaster, he is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. 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 FPAMedia Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls College, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and The Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the great-great-grandson of Sophia Dalrymple (née Pattle).