Alice Albinia read English Literature at Cambridge University. After graduating, she moved to Delhi, where she worked for the next two a half years as a journalist and editor for the Centre for Science & Environment, Biblio: A Review of Books, Outlook Traveller, and several other Indian newspapers and magazines.
It was during this time, as she travelled around the country writing articles and features, that she had the idea to write a history of the River Indus. In 2002, she moved back to London to take an
MA in South Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she researched the religious and political history of the Indus region.
Empires of the Indus is her first book, for which she won a Royal Society of Literature / Jerwood Foundation Special Prize for non-fiction work in progress, a Somerset Maugham Award and the Dolman Travel Prize.