LONDON: Bestselling author William Dalrymple’s ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World’ and Sunil Amrith’s ‘The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years’ are among six non-fiction works shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize 2025 in London on Tuesday.

The prize, now in its 13th year and worth 25,000 pounds, rewards and celebrates the best works of non-fiction based on exceptional research in the fields of the humanities and social sciences.

Dalrymple, a historian-author who divides his time between India and the UK, has been recognised for his latest work, which charts the influence of Indian science, architecture, art and religious thought over millennia.

US-based Amrith, who was born in Kenya to South Indian parents and grew up in Singapore, has been chosen for placing the environment at the centre of human history with his book.

In a brilliant display of imaginative synthesis, William Dalrymple brings together areas of scholarship that seldom engage with each other… to build his powerful case: the influence of Indian science, architecture, art and religious thought created a millennium-long and continent-spanning Indosphere’, whose influence is with us today, the judges said of Dalrymple’s book, which they said was vivid in detail, lively in description and dazzling in range.

It offers us a new way of thinking of global history, the judges noted.