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 Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage, the Hemingway Prize, 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. He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi. Anita Anand has been a radio and television journalist for almost twenty years. She is the presenter of Any Answers, the political phone-in programme on BBC Radio 4. During her career, she has also presented Drive, Doubletake and the Anita Anand Show on Radio 5 Live, and Saturday Live, The Westminster Hour, Beyond Westminster, Midweek and Woman's Hour on Radio 4.

On BBC television she has presented The Daily Politics, The Sunday Politics and Newsnight. She has interviewed five Indian Prime Ministers, three from Pakistan, two from Great Britain and one from Bangladesh. She lives in west London. Sophia is her first book. It is the winner of the Eastern Eye Alchemy Festival Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize.