Christopher de Bellaigue

Christopher de Bellaigue is the award-winning author of six books, including The Islamic Enlightenment, which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Orwell Prize in 2017. His latest book, The Lion House, was a Sunday Times, New Yorker and Spectator book of the year and was described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘Wolf Hall for the Ottoman Empire…a gripping story told with intelligence, knowledge and verve.’ As a reporter in the 1990s and 2000s, he covered the Middle East, Turkey and South Asia. His writing appeared in the Economist, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books. He has made several television and radio programmes and is an honorary fellow of the University of St Andrews.