Prince William and his wife Kate, the Princess of Wales, are set to arrive in India this week for a three-day visit culminating in the Earthshot Prize awards ceremony.
The trip marks a significant moment for the couple, and particularly for Kate, as it is her biggest foreign trip since undergoing preventative chemotherapy for cancer in 2024.
The heir-to-the-throne, William, 44, and Kate, 44, will fly out for a series of events across Mumbai. The visit includes Tuesday’s Earthshot Prize awards ceremony, which organisers say will be its biggest so far. William founded the Earthshot Prize in 2020 to find solutions to climate change. It awards five winners £1 million ($1.3 million) each to scale up their projects.
“For the prince, Earthshot is ultimately about replacing pessimism with possibility,” a spokesperson for the couple’s office at Kensington Palace said. “It is about demonstrating that while the environmental challenges facing our planet are serious, the ingenuity, determination and creativity being applied to solving them are every bit as powerful.”
At the awards ceremony, the royals will be joined by a number of celebrities including Indian cricketing great Sachin Tendulkar, actors Alia Bhatt and Rami Malek, and British pop group Take That, who will give their first-ever performance in India.
“To be performing here for the very first time, after all these years, and alongside the extraordinary people creating a better future for our planet – is really special,” the group said in a statement.
Away from Earthshot, the royals will also attend events linked to Indian cricket, fashion and cinema. For Kate, who is now in remission but says the illness still impacts her life, the trip represents a return to high-profile overseas engagements. Her only major overseas visit since 2024 came in May when she travelled alone to Italy for two days.
“I was told in hospital that my recovery would not be linear. There will be good days and bad days, that it will take time,” she said in an interview published in the latest edition of Country Life magazine.
