Patrick French

Patrick French (born 1966) is a British writer and historian, based in London and Delhi. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he studied English and American literature.

French is the author of several books including: Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), a biography of Francis Younghusband, The World Is What It Is (2008), an authorised biography of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States of America, and India: a Portrait: an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people (2010).

During the 1992 general election, French was a Green Party candidate for Parliament. He has sat on the executive committee of the Tibet Support Group UK, and was a founding member of the inter-governmental India-UK Round Table.

At the age of 25, French set off on a trail across Central Asia to retrace the steps of British explorer Francis Younghusband. This resulted in the publication of his first book, Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer in 1994. The book went on to win both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature's W. H. Heinemann Prize.

French's next book, Liberty or Death – India's Journey to Independence and Division was published in 1997 and earned the author accolades and brickbats in equal parts. Described in the Indian media as presenting a "revisionist view" of Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammad Ali Jinnah's role in the Indian Independence movement, there were a few calls to ban the book in India. On the other hand, Philip Ziegler hailed it as "a remarkable achievement," and Khushwant Singh described the author as "a first rate historian and storyteller." The book sold heavily due to the controversy and French was awarded the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year award for the book.

...
Wikipedia