Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 13 hours ago
Across a remarkably varied body of work from the beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series to his philosophically interrogative Isabel Dalhousie, Alexander McCall Smith returns, time and again, to the small moral choices that shape lives and communities. In conversation with William Dalrymple, McCall Smith discusses his upcoming works and ever-expanding literary world, where humour and empathy accompany questions of how we live, choose, and care for one another.
Sir Alexander McCall Smith, born in 1948, is a highly prolific and widely admired author. Raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he moved to Scotland at 17 to study at the University of Edinburgh and later built a distinguished academic career in Medical Law, teaching in universities in the United Kingdom and Botswana before becoming a full-time writer. He gained international acclaim with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has helped foster a more positive global perception of Botswana. His extensive literary output includes the 44 Scotland Street novels, the longest-running serial novel in the world, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the von Igelfeld books, and the Ulf Varg series, along with stand-alone novels, short stories, poetry, and children’s literature. In 2024, he launched The Perfect Passion Company series and was knighted for services to literature, academia, and charity.
William Dalrymple is the author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, was shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington medal, the Tata Book of the Year, and the Historical Writers Association Award, and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. Dalrymple has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, where he is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. His latest book is The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World.
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0:00 A Shared History of Stories
2:07 An Unexpected Medical Tale
5:21 The Evolution of a Detective
9:37 The Reality of Crime Fiction
13:26 The Old Botswana Morality
18:54 The Subconscious Creative Process
25:29 The World of German Professors
32:35 The Longest Serialized Novel
Across a remarkably varied body of work from the beloved No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series to his philosophically interrogative Isabel Dalhousie, Alexander McCall Smith returns, time and again, to the small moral choices that shape lives and communities. In conversation with William Dalrymple, McCall Smith discusses his upcoming works and ever-expanding literary world, where humour and empathy accompany questions of how we live, choose, and care for one another.
Sir Alexander McCall Smith, born in 1948, is a highly prolific and widely admired author. Raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), he moved to Scotland at 17 to study at the University of Edinburgh and later built a distinguished academic career in Medical Law, teaching in universities in the United Kingdom and Botswana before becoming a full-time writer. He gained international acclaim with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which has helped foster a more positive global perception of Botswana. His extensive literary output includes the 44 Scotland Street novels, the longest-running serial novel in the world, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the von Igelfeld books, and the Ulf Varg series, along with stand-alone novels, short stories, poetry, and children’s literature. In 2024, he launched The Perfect Passion Company series and was knighted for services to literature, academia, and charity.
William Dalrymple is the author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, was shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington medal, the Tata Book of the Year, and the Historical Writers Association Award, and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. Dalrymple has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, where he is currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. His latest book is The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World.
Follow us on –
Website - jlflitfest.org
Facebook - facebook.com/JLFInternational
YouTube - youtube.com/@JLFInternational
Instagram - instagram.com/jlfinternational
X - twitter.com/JLFLitfest
#kindness #kindnessmatters #jlflondon
0:00 A Shared History of Stories
2:07 An Unexpected Medical Tale
5:21 The Evolution of a Detective
9:37 The Reality of Crime Fiction
13:26 The Old Botswana Morality
18:54 The Subconscious Creative Process
25:29 The World of German Professors
32:35 The Longest Serialized Novel
