Ruby Lal

Los Angeles Times Finalist and Emory University Professor of South Asian History, Ruby Lal is the author, most recently, of VAGABOND PRINCESS: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale University Press, February 2024). Selected as one of the most anticipated non-fiction books by Ms. Magazine, and by History Today, Vagabond Princess is longlisted for the Cundill History Prize, and has been lauded by the BBC, NPR, The Hindu, Times Literary Supplement, The Literary Magazine, The Vogue, The Wall Street Journal and numerous other national and international journals, magazines and newspapers in the USA, UK, Europe and India.

Ruby’s previous biography Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (NY: W. W. Norton, 2018, 2020) won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography and was a Finalist in History for the LA Times Book Prize. Among the top ten pick of the Time Magazine, EMPRESS received extensive press in The Telegraph, the Prospect Magazine, New Yorker, Guardian, New York Times, BBC, and The Indian Express. EMPRESS has been optioned by Lionsgate. Ruby’s remix of Empress for young adults, Tiger-Slayer is forthcoming in Spring 2025 (W. W. Norton, NY). The illustrations for this book are drawn Molly Crabapple, NY based artist and author. Ruby is as well the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World AND Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. These books won much acclaim in international journals and magazines, such as the New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and Times Literary Supplement. She has received numerous fellowships, among them from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden, and as Public Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. And most recently as Distinguished International Fellow at the University of Bonn. She has written numerous essays and literary pieces in the USA, UK and India and speaks regularly at national and international venues, radio and podcasts, book clubs, literary festivals and ecumenical and literary retreats. For more information: https://rubylal.com/