NEW DELHI, October 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --
Six Titles are on the Shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize This Year and William Dalrymple's Return of a King has Been Described by the Chair of Judges as Being 'as Fine an Example of Unlearned Lessons From History as you Could Find'
The shortlisted authors will appear at Cheltenham Literature Festival on 6 October and at the Southbank Centre on 3 November.
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The BBC Culture Show will also broadcast pieces about each work on 30 October on BBC Two.
The prize, funded by an anonymous sponsor, is open to authors of all non-fiction books in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts.
This year's winner of the £20,000 prize will be announced on 4 November.
William Dalrymple: "Since the Samuel Johnson Prize began, each of my four books has been on the longlist. The last three - White Mughals, The Last Mughal and Nine Lives all failed to make it through to the shortlist. Now at last, Return of a King has slipped in and I can't quite believe it. The Samuel Johnson is the non-fiction sister of the Booker or the British equivalent to the Pulitzer, except it's open to all non-fiction books in the English language. I'm completely thrilled, especially as it means I'm the first ever India-based author to make it onto the shortlist. It's an exciting moment not just for me, but the growing phalanx of non-fiction authors-historians, biographers, travel-writers-who write about this remarkable region. India has long dominated prize lists for the novel. Hopefully this is the beginning of a similar trend for non-fiction."
Diya Kar Hazra, Publisher - Trade: "William's been on the Samuel Johnson longlist three times before and Return of a King making the shortlist this year comes as no surprise at all - it's his best work to date. This outstanding book, so relevant to us today, really deserves to win."
About the Book
Return of a King is a history which resonates with contemporary politics and reads like a richly drawn novel. Using previously undiscovered Afghan sources, here for the first time is the full story of Britain's disastrous adventure in Afghanistan that begs the question: have we learnt anything from history? With a riveting narrative and a complex cast of characters - shahs, amirs, sepoys, British generals and Russian ambassadors - Return of a King is history at its best.
In the spring of 1839, British forces invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk.
On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The first Anglo-Afghan war ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of the then most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat and utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen.
About the Author
William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, The Age of Kali, White Mughals, The Last Mughal and, most recently, Nine Lives. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d'Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone Crossword Award and has three times been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. In 2012, he was appointed Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in Humanities at Princeton University.
Praise for Return of a King
'Magnificent... Perceptive and warmly humane... Compulsive reading.' - Diana Athill, The Guardian
'William Dalrymple combines in himself three remarkable talents. First, he is a researcher par excellence. Second, he has the insight of a historian. And third, as a writer of exceptional dexterity, he is able to make historical research very readable.' - Pawan K. Varma, Business Standard
'As taut and richly embroidered as a great novel... A masterpiece of nuanced writing and research, and a thrilling account of a watershed Victorian conflict.' - Rupert Edis, Sunday Telegraph
'Brilliant...The greatest new contribution and the single greatest strength of this book is its employment of Afghan and Indian sources to examine the war from the point of view of the Afghans themselves and the Indian soldiers who made up the majority of the 'British' force. The other thing that has marked out Dalrymple's work is his unflinching look at British Imperial atrocities... Even 170 years later, the events described in Return of a King still have the power to shock- and so they should.' - Anatole Lieven, Financial Times
'Definitive...It is Dalrymple's achievement to elucidate this initial episode of the Great Game through a treasure trove of original sources. Many of them he unearthed abroad, mining archives in Kabul, Lahore and Delhi even finding first-hand material in Moscow. He writes elegantly, appreciating, like all masters of his craft, that history should aspire to the condition of literature. It teaches unforgettable lessons about the perils of neocolonial adventures everywhere.' - Piers Brendan, The Literary Review
'To call it anything less than a triumph would be an understatement.' - Saurabh Kumar Shahi, Sunday Indian
Praise for Nine Lives
'The celebrated historian and traveller at his exuberant and erudite best. It is impossible not to be profoundly moved by the stories in Nine Lives' - Pico Iyer, Time magazine
'Dalrymple writes about India with more knowledge and elegance than does any Indian I know. It is unputdownable. It is a priceless documentary of different people whose existence I was only vaguely aware of. I feel enriched after reading Nine Lives and strongly recommend it.' - Khushwant Singh, The Telegraph
'Nine Lives remains oddly gripping, and often very moving, in its first-person accounts, framed by minimal explanations, of spiritually-minded people that Dalrymple meets on his travels across the subcontinent' - Pankaj Mishra, The National
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