On video from Stanfords’ London shop last night, the company’s chairman and chief executive, Vivien Godfrey, also announced that an award for an outstanding contribution to travel writing had been made to that tireless trailblazer Dervla Murphy, and that the Bradt Guides new travel writer of the year was Anita King, for an article about Damascus.

  Shadow City, Khan’s debut, was originally published by Penguin in India, where it won the 2020 Tata Literature Live! first book award in the non-fiction category. There’s a brief extract from it on the Penguin website, and more of the author’s work on the porterfolio site. I’ve also linked below to an interview in which Khan talked to Alice Albinia, winner herself in 2009 of what was then the Dolman prize, for Empires of the Indus.