An Evening with William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is the prize-winning author of White Mughals and City of Djinns. He returns to Auckland to give us a personal tour through his new book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.

A distillation of his 25 years of exploring India and its religious traditions, he introduces us to nine people taking different religious paths, each one an unforgettable story. From a Buddhist monk who takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet and then spends years trying to atone for the violence by hand-printing the best prayer flags in India to a prison warden from Kerala who becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as an incarnate deity before returning to his job at the prison, to an illiterate goat-herder from Rajasthan who keeps alive an ancient 4000-line sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows by heart.

This mesmerising work is Dalrymple’s first travel book in a decade, and we’re delighted to welcome him back.

Presented as a part of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.