Vikram Sampath Add a review

Vikram Sampath is an Indian popular historian and columnist, who is noted for writing biographies of Gauhar Jaan, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Mysore Kings. He is Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Eisenhower and Aspen Global Fellow and Senior Research Fellow of Prime Ministers' Museum and Library Society. He is also a columnist for The Print. He is also the founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival.

Sampath was born in Karnataka. After academic training in engineering, mathematics, and finance, he worked in banking. In 2008, he published a history of the Wadiyar Dynasty of Mysore—a childhood fascination. In 2012, he published a biography of Gauhar Jaan, which received critical acclaim and won the Yuva Puraskar in English literature from Sahitya Akademi. The next year, Sampath published a biography of S. Balachander, which also garnered positive reviews.

In 2013, Sampath left his job at Hewlett-Packard to begin a PhD in ethnomusicology and history at the University of Queensland, Australia. In 2019 and 2021, he wrote a two-part biography of Savarkar that received praise for its thorough detail but was criticised for its uncritical treatment of the subject. In September 2021, Sampath was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

In February 2022, some academics accused Sampath of plagiarism, providing examples of near-identical reproduction of other authors' works in his corpus. Sampath denied the allegations and initiated a lawsuit.