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Dilip Hiro is a playwright, political writer, journalist, historian and analyst specializing in India and the Islamic world, ranging from Iraq and Lebanon to the Central Asian republics. He was born to Hindu parents in Larkana, British India, who migrated to independent India after partition in 1947. Hiro received a masters degree from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He currently lives in London, where he settled in the mid-1960s.

Hiro is the author of 30 titles, including his most recent book Blood of the Earth: The Global Battle for Vanishing Oil Resources (2008), described by Steven Poole in the Guardian as "encyclopaedic yet racily readable account of the economy, science and geopolitics of oil over the past century." He is editor of the most recent edition of the Babur Nama: Journal of Emperor Babur (2007). He has also written Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Collapse of American Power in the Middle East (2003) and a Dictionary of the Middle East (1996). He has contributed to 16 more books, including The World According To Tom Dispatch (2008). He is noted for his opposition to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, arguing that it will only fuel more fundamentalist terrorism and further destabilize the Middle East.

As a journalist he contributes to The Observer, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post and is a commentator on the BBC, Sky News, CNN, and various radio stations.

To Anchor a Cloud, his 3-act stage play about Moghul emperor Shah Jahan and his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal (for whom he built the Taj Mahal) premiered in London in 1970 and had a public reading in Delhi in 2008. His film, Moving Portraits, directed by Horace Ové and produced by Vijay Amarnani, was screened by Channel 4 in 1987.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Dilip Hiro", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0